A Light in the Dark
by Amalialia
Summary: Pennywise offers the Losers a dark deal: their freedom for Bill Denbrough. But when he adds an unexpected wild card to the deal, their broken hearts are left with no choice but to accept. Alternate (and ongoing!) ending to IT (2017). Follows the aftermath to the future.
1. Chapter 1

_Note: just saw the new adaptation of IT! The ending scene stayed in my head after the film, and I wondered how things might have played out if the Losers had taken Pennywise up on the offer to trade their freedom for Bill's, and what it might have taken for them to agree to the deal. I've seen both films but haven't ever quite made it through the book, so apologies if anything is out of place here - consider it an alternate universe of sorts! Keen to hear what you think, please leave a review if you're so inclined :)_

* * *

"I'll take _all_ of you, and I'll feast on your flesh as I feed on your fear. Or..."

The clown's otherworldly voice trailed off, his eyes alight with sudden excitement, his arm around Bill's neck tightening as the other six Losers stared in horror at their captive leader. They all knew in the pits of their stomachs that a deal with Pennywise was not going to lead to any kind of happy-ever-after.

"You'll just leave us be," he rasped, stroking Bill's trembling cheek.

"I'll take him, _only_ him... and I'll have my long rest... and you will all live to grow and thrive and lead happy lives... until old age takes you back to the weeds."

A heavy silence hung over them, as Pennywise's cruel offer stabbed at their hearts. Leave Bill behind, to a fate worse than death? And live the rest of their lives like none of this had ever happened?

Before anyone could say anything, Bill's voice broke the silence.

"Leave," he choked, his voice shaky but his eyes firm. Pennywise grinned down at his captive. "I'm the one who dragged you all into this. I'm s-s-so, I'm s-sorry."

"I'm s-s-sorry!" mocked Pennywise, his grin widening.

The Losers stood motionless, staring at Bill.

"Go!" he shouted.

Bev looked around at the others, her eyes brimming.

"Guys. We can't," she pleaded, knowing deep in her heart that they were all considering the offer, even briefly, even against their will.

Richie was the first to move, scooting backwards on the ground.

"Sorry," he croaked weakly, as he got to his feet. His voice strengthened and his eyes hardened as he stared down at his friend.

"I told you Bill. I _fucking_ told you... I don't wanna die. It's your fault."

The clown's lips twisted in a satisfied smile as Richie's words filled the space between them. Bill's expression was unchanged by Richie's words, as if he felt deserving of the accusation.

"You punched me in the face," Richie continued, pacing on the ground. "You made me walk in shitty water, you brought me to a _fucking crackhead house_..."

Pennywise's expression faltered, the smile dropping from his face.

"And now..." Richie didn't break eye contact with the clown as he pulled a bat from the junk pile. "I'm gonna have to kill this fucking clown."

Pennywise snarled, furious at this turn of events. Richie took a step towards them, brandishing the bat with far more bravery that he felt internally.

It seemed almost imminent that the clown would charge at him... but then Pennywise stopped, his eyes flickering with the ghost of an idea.

"Wait," the creature said, looking down at the defiant Bill. "I have a better idea."

Pennywise made a gesture with his hand, and suddenly their gaze was drawn upwards to the terrifying carousel of floating children above their heads. A small shape was slowly floating down towards them, out of the spiralling bodies. Bill's eyes filled with tears as he saw the yellow rain jacket encasing the shape, which rapidly resolved into that of a small child.

Georgie's body came to a stop above their heads, hovering. The place where his right arm had once been was only a stump, darkened to black with pooled blood, severed above the elbow. They could make out his face now, pale and dripping with water, his eyes the same hollow white that Bev's had been when they found her floating above the ground. Ben was the first to realise what that meant, and he gasped.

Bill had come to the same realisation.

"Georgie's... a-a-alive?" he whispered, the tears leaking out the corners of his eyes.

"Yes," smirked Pennywise. "Only just. I kept him, saved him for later, knew there was something _special_ about the boy with the wax boat..."

His eyes dropped again to Bill, his gloved hand brushing the hair from his head in the mockery of an affectionate gesture.

"I didn't realise that special thing was his brother."

Bill was crying now, struggling against Pennywise's grip, desperately trying to get to his little brother. He'd spent the last year trying to find Georgie, trying to convince himself that against the odds he was just missing - not dead - even if no one else believed, even as his parents' pitying eyes judged him, even though he was slowly coming to terms in his heart that Georgie was gone forever...

"No," he cried, his hand reaching out. "Georgie!"

"Here's my deal," snapped Pennywise, his humour disappearing, his teeth sharper than ever. "Same as before, but I'll throw in dear Georgie as a bonus. Billy stays with me."

"No!" cried Eddie, sensing what was coming.

"Yes." Bill's voice wasn't wavering this time. He was still held by Pennywise, but his face was set. "Take Georgie, p-please. Get him to a hospital. I'll be fine."

He barely stuttered in his words to them, and the Losers all felt their hearts sink at the words of their friend who no longer wanted to be saved. Pennywise had played the meanest trick of all, knowing Bill would willingly go to his grave to save his younger brother. After all this time, Bill still felt the most responsible for what had happened to Georgie that grey stormy day.

"Bill, no," whispered Ben. Bev's hands were over her mouth, her eyes welling as she shook her head slowly. Stan and Richie were silent, their eyes dark. Mike tightened his grip on his metal pipe, his knuckles white. Eddie was twisting something in his hands, over and over and over.

Tears slowly trickled down Bill's cheeks as he spoke.

"Prove he's alive."

This was directly at Pennywise, who cocked his head to the side, silver eyes gleaming in the darkness. The still body of Georgie drifted down to ground level, where it landed gently in the water in front of the other Losers. They rushed to his side, crowding around him as his eyes slowly faded from milky white to brown. He blinked, causing a sharp inhalation of breath from Eddie, and hazily looked around but didn't move.

"Tick tock, Billy boy," chimed the clown in his ear. "The after-effects of suspension will wear off soon, and missing an arm has gotta be painful for a little kid like that."

Bill breathed in, his throat dry, looking sadly at his friends and brother.

"T-t-tell Georgie... tell Georgie I love h-him."

Their hearts breaking, the Losers stood unmoving.

"Go," he repeated his earlier statement. "GO!"

His friends looked from him to his brother, knowing they wouldn't be able to change his mind. Knowing there was nothing they could say or do that could fix this situation, that Pennywise had held all the cards all along. Bev was the first to move, scooping the small frame of Georgie up in her arms carefully, and nodding once through her tears at the first boy she'd ever loved.

"We'll make sure he's safe," she vowed. "I promise. Come on, everyone... let's go."

The others, stunned into motion by her words, gathered their things. Pennywise watched them through slitted eyes, his grip tightening possessively on Bill, breathing heavily. He clearly didn't trust them to keep their word.

The Losers, in one tight knit group around Bev and Georgie, took a final look at their brave leader, across the cold cavern. Bill tried to ignore Pennywise's wet breath on his neck as he forced a weak smile at them, thanking them with his eyes for taking care of his brother. For them, there were no words, what could they possibly say, nothing seemed like it could ever be enough to summarise the sacrifice Bill was making. Even Richie, for the first time in his life, was lost for words.

So they filed silently through the open pipe, towards the indifferent world above, leaving Bill and Pennywise to the eerie silence of the clown's watery lair.

Pennywise abruptly let go of Bill, throwing him to the water where he splashed against the shallow surface, coughing, on his hands and knees, his face still wet with tears.

"You're a fool," Pennywise said, his voice almost lyrical. "All that for a no-good kid with only one arm."

"Shut up," Bill said through gritted teeth, refusing to look at the clown and instead staring at the murky water. "Just kill me already."

"Oh we're going to have some fun first, Billy, darling," drawled the clown, pulling him up by his hair from the water to face him. He cried out in pain, his hands grasping at the clown's tight grip. "In all my years here in the charming town of Derry, no one's ever even gotten close to stopping me, let alone raised a small army of children against their deepest and darkest fears."

He reached a gloved hand to grab Bill's chin roughly, forcing the boy to look straight at him.

"You, however... you taught them not to fear. You brought them together, even despite my best efforts to tear you all apart. You were the binding force, the key to their power."

Bill glared at the clown, his green eyes dark with hatred.

"Now you're _mine_ ," Pennywise smiled.

With one sharp movement, he threw Bill across the cavern to the rocky wall, where he hit it hard. He heard a crack in his chest, some of his ribs had broken from the impact. He tried to get up, but the impact had dazed him and everything was suddenly wobbly. The next second, Pennywise was there, pulling him up against the wall, his glowing amber eyes staring into Bill's, rows and rows of teeth rippling with anticipation.

"Oh, I will _so_ enjoy devouring your flesh and licking your bones clean," Pennywise whispered, a dark promise, his sharp fingernail tracing a bloody path down Bill's damp cheek. "And you can take comfort in knowing that you will have died in vain, that my cycle will continue forever and no one will ever, _ever_ , get as close as you and your band of Losers did."

Bill felt the horrible empty aching in his chest that Pennywise sought to induce, felt the hopelessness and futility crushing him, and against his will, the flutter of fear for what fate awaited him. His chest burned with pain, as the clown pressed cruelly on his broken ribs. But regardless of his fear, or in spite of it, he swallowed the lump in his throat and met the clown's steady gaze.

"You're wrong." His small voice stilled Pennywise, whose eyes flashed with anger at the defiance. "I know my friends. I know their power. They will defeat you."

The clown hissed, infuriated.

"They will defeat you," he repeated, a vow of the distant future, a wish despite the longest odds.

Pennywise opened his mouth, revealing dozens of rows of teeth, an infinite tunnel of teeth just waiting to sink into Bill's skin. Faintly glowing orbs at the end of the tunnel of teeth drew Bill in, captivated him with their luminescence, and he felt his awareness melting away into the soft orange glow.

"... _they will defeat you_...", he whispered, the light fading from his eyes.

And then there was only darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

_Note: here is an unexpected second part to this fic! I never planned for it to go beyond a one-shot, but the enthusiastic reviews encouraged me to give some more thought about where it might go next. Not sure after this, possibly one more chapter dealing with the aftermath from the Losers' perspective, maybe future stuff... but we'll see. Sorry if I get any details wrong, I'm filling in the blanks with myself until I finish the book :) Thank you *very* much to the awesome people who reviewed, I hope you like this second chapter - it wouldn't exist if not for you! Reviews/thoughts/comments are very welcome and appreciated ^^_

* * *

Somehow, this win didn't feel much like a win.

Pennywise perched on the edge of his junk pile, bristling, fuming, glaring at the inert body of the boy who'd caused him so much trouble over the last months. The stupid mortal child who refused to give up in his search for his lost younger brother, and who had somehow managed to resist the tempting tendrils of fear offered by the monster known to him and his friends as "It".

He wanted to rip the human apart, oh he did _so much_ want to devour him, but instead he'd suspended the child into a dark dreamless sleep, while he sat contemplating his situation and how to inflict the maximum pain on the boy who had come so close to unravelling everything he'd worked for millennia to build. After all this time seeing humans in what he thought were all their forms, he was annoyed that he could still be surprised, knocked off guard even.

It was a uniquely human ability, he'd found, to be terrified inside - _literally sick to your stomach_ \- and yet to put on a brave face to the point where it actually helped to conquer the fear. It frustrated him. Children were _supposed_ to be simple. It was meant to be a case of appearing, reading their darkest fears, and making them a reality so that the child was overcome by the sheer terror. It made them taste _so_ much better. He'd figured that out a long time ago, after his early interactions with adults. Adults were boring, and dumb despite their desire to think otherwise, and while the majority of them were irrational at their core, they were much harder work than the smaller humans. Or at least, till now.

 _Bill Denbrough._ The thorn in his side, now finally taken care of. Why hadn't he killed him yet? Well, for one, the boy wasn't scared enough of him or his manifestations of fear, so his flesh probably wouldn't taste that good. But there was more to it than that, despite what the creature wished to believe.

The boy confused him.

He hadn't been lying when he said it was the first time anyone got close to taking him down. Sure, it was the Losers as a whole, but Pennywise recognised the truth: they were not united without Bill, and without him they would fall apart. That was why making this deal had been so worth it, as it essentially destroyed their chances of ever becoming a threat to Pennywise again. But now, in the aftermath... he was unsettled.

The child seemed driven by emotions that Pennywise couldn't quite understand, couldn't comprehend - when he looked inside the boy's head, more than anything else he found this warm glowing feeling, a terrible perfume of devotion that made Pennywise nauseous. The feeling was, of course, linked to Georgie. To his friends. _Why did humans care so much about each other anyway?_ Pennywise didn't like that, there were many species in the universe and few were as emotional as the humans. It worked in his favour to some extent: their ability to feel emotion meant they were exemplary at feeling fear. Which is why he'd stayed on this forsaken planet so long... How long had it been? He'd lost count of the centuries by now.

There was a darker emotion there too, in the boy, something that had eaten at Bill for the last months, something that potentially drove him in equal effect as the love he felt for his brother. The feeling, Pennywise recognised well, he used it often on adults.

It was guilt.

He found it laughingly ironic that this eleven year old boy felt so much guilt for what had happened to Georgie, considering who was really responsible. But in the child's mixed emotions was the clear feeling of responsibility, for making the boat that sailed down the streets to lead an innocent boy into the teeth of the clown in the sewer. His feelings of love for his brother were so _pure_ that it almost burned Pennywise to sense them.

 _Oh yes_ , he did want to make this troublesome human suffer! The clown gurgled, annoyed that even a suspended Bill could cause him so much frustration. Killing him was not enough. He'd denied Pennywise his right to feed again, and again, _and again_. Now, Pennywise had found himself letting seven _terrified_ children leave his lair freely all for this stupid child that he couldn't even figure out what to do with. He shrieked in anger, grabbed the boy from the sky, and sunk his teeth deep into his neck, hoping to be free from this indecision.

But the blood was tainted, as he suspected. He pushed the inanimate Bill away from him, disgusted, spitting out the taste of him. Like an unripe fruit, Bill tasted of all the things that Pennywise despised: love, sacrifice, acceptance, _hope_. He really did believe the words he said, that one day his friends would return to stop Pennywise for good. He even believed his brother would help them.

"Fat chance," Pennywise snarled, his arms crossed. The Losers had already started to forget, and in the months to come, they wouldn't even be able to put a face to Bill's name. His magic was working hard to unravel the chains in their memories, to sever the links and bonds they'd felt so strongly to Bill. By the end of it, they wouldn't remember him at all. If all went to plan, then the entire town of Derry would forget about Bill eventually, as if he'd never existed in the first place.

But there was not much time before the sleep would come. Pennywise had sacrificed time to acquire Bill, and would be hibernating on less of a full stomach than he would normally prefer. It meant he would wake up in 27 years all the hungrier for it, but that was of somewhat little concern to him since there would be no Losers to try and stop him. He vaguely hoped they would still be around the town though, with children of their own, so he could devour their offspring - his promise to let them go did not extend past the current generation of Losers.

But what to do with Bill, before the sleep? What was the boy _truly_ afraid of?

Pennywise eyed him up, probed his mind harder, looking deep to reveal the most hidden fears that he was protecting. When he found what he was looking for, he couldn't say he was really surprised. In the end, the clown concluded, the boy seemed to have the true hang-ups of a leader. The fear that stood out the most, that had echoed through his actions over the months and even down here in the sewer, was that the people around him, the people that he cared about, would get hurt. A simple fear really, not so uncommon. Ironic that he should drag his dear friends into such dangerous situations, but he'd always planned to be the one that would make the sacrifice should it come to it.

The clown smirked.

If Bill's darkest fears were watching those around him get hurt, then at least here was a way he could torture the boy for the next 27 years. The mindscape was an old friend of Pennywise the dancing clown, and down here in his lair he had the most powers of all over the dreams of humans. He conjured up a variety of scenarios to play on repeat in Bill's young mind, of Georgie, Bev, Eddie, Richie, Ben, Mike, and Stan all being destroyed in various ways, mostly by Pennywise but some not, some of which were memories, others that were premonitions or parallel timelines, all of which were inevitably felt deeply by Bill as his fault.

He observed with satisfaction as the first scenario started to play out in Bill's head, where an older Stan commits suicide, driven to madness and unable to stand the memories of their experiences as children. Bill's forehead crinkled, his eyes still the same empty opalescent white as before, a lone tear leaking down his cheek. Pennywise felt quite chuffed with his plan. Torturing Bill endlessly for years with the ghosts of his friends and family would definitely break the boy - he'd be a horrible unstable mess by the time Pennywise awoke from his slumber in 27 years and, hopefully, the taste of his fear and despair would be _delicious._

He watched a little longer as Bill's pain deepened, feeling the aura of guilt and sadness around the boy grow. This was much better than killing him outright, it was everything the foolish child deserved and more for ever daring to cross the creature known as "It".

Humming a little, Pennywise began the preparations for his long slumber.


	3. Chapter 3

_Note: Wow! Thanks so *so* much for all your awesome reviews, they really mean a lot to me :D It's my first time writing anything for a long time, and it's so great to hear that people are enjoying it. You guys are the reason I'm continuing this fic, so thank you for your support :):) This is a slightly longer chapter, and marks the end of the "present day" alternate ending. It will hopefully answer some questions you have about what the future might look like for the Losers! I have some ideas for a future arc, though they're still forming, so I can't promise that that would come anytime soon (but I'll do my best). I kind of want to finish reading the book before I do though, and as you all know, it's a rather chunky piece of literature ;) Made some good progress on the plane I just got off though! Anyway I hope you like this new addition - look forward to hearing your thoughts :) Random sidenote: why is Georgie's left arm severed in the book, but his right arm in the film? That is such a strange detail to change and really confused me for a bit! O.o_

* * *

 _And you thought the lions were bad_  
 _Well, they tried to kill my brothers_  
 _And for every king that died_  
 _Oh, they would crown another_  
 _And it's harder than you think_  
 _Telling dreams from one another..._  
\- Daniel In The Den, Bastille

They made their way as fast as they could through the sewer tunnels, their feet splashing up droplets of the foul water as they went. Her forehead damp with sweat, Bev shifted the weight of the cradled Georgie in her arms, being careful to be gentle with his injured arm. He was unconscious again, having passed out not long after Pennywise revived him. Given the state of his arm, it was probably for the best. She turned to Ben.

"Are we still heading the right way?"

The other boy nodded firmly, confident in his ability to navigate them out of the murky labyrinth beneath Derry. He'd memorised the maps in his head, and he knew they were getting close now.

"Just another few turns and we're there," he said assuredly. The six of them continued onwards, their hearts heavy, trying not to think about how every step took them further away from the malicious clown... and away from Bill.

They came to a stop in front of the round entrance, the rope that had granted them entry hanging dead still in the murky light of the long-empty well. Eddie was the first to reach the entrance, almost eagerly, his hand outstretched towards the frayed rope.

He hesitated, and turned to look back at the others.

"Are we... _sure_?" he asked nervously, his gaze flicking back towards the tunnels they'd come from. "About... leaving him?"

The air seemed thicker than normal, making it hard for them to breathe.

"No," blurted Richie, his face crestfallen. "No not at all and not ever. Who knows what that monster is..."

He trailed off, seeing the expressions on the other Losers' faces. The whole journey back through the tunnels, the silence between them had been threaded with the fears and worries for Bill back in the creature's lair, alone and defenceless. Would Pennywise simply kill him? Would he instead play with their friend, like a cat toys with a mouse? What dark things might the clown do to Bill now that they were gone, if the boy was really to be the last sacrifice taken before another 27 years of hibernation?

An image of her father advancing towards her made Bev shiver, and she hoped to whatever Gods might be out there that the clown didn't hurt Bill like that.

"Guys," she said lowly, her voice level. "We're going to come back for him." There was far more confidence in her voice than she felt, but she saw the effect of her words in the relief spreading across the faces of her friends.

"We will?" Mike asked hopefully.

"Obviously," she nodded. "But we need to do what we promised first, and make sure Georgie is okay. Get him to the hospital."

As if he heard his name from his unconscious state, Georgie's eyes scrunched a little, his forehead creasing in pain. His left arm twitched towards his right arm, as if to make a motion of grabbing at it.

"And we need to do it _fast_ ," Bev realised, some urgency creeping in her tone.

"Yeah, everything will be a lot harder if he wakes up and is in pain," Stan added worriedly.

With a newfound resolve, his heart lighter knowing they would come back to rescue Bill, Eddie grabbed the rope and pulled it towards them.

"Someone should go first," Mike said, gesturing up. "Then, they help to raise Georgie up, and the rest of us come up after."

"Good point," Ben agreed, looking around them. An old wasted piece of cardboard box was lying on the ground not too far away, and would work well as a makeshift stretcher. He'd always had a bit of an eye for structures.

"You go first, Richie, you're good at climbing," said Eddie, holding out the rope. Richie nodded and, without a word, grabbed it from Eddie and started ascending, grunting a little with the effort of hauling his body weight up. Once he was at the top, he yelled down to them.

They lowered Georgie onto the cardboard, and Ben expertly tied the rope both around it and him so he would be secured. Then, with some degree of apprehension, they lifted the stretcher into the empty space beyond and gave Richie the signal to hoist it out of the well. Ben winced as the soggy cardboard sagged under gravity, but after an agonisingly long time, Georgie was lifted safely out of the well.

"Got him!" Richie called triumphantly. The rest of them then began to make their way up, with varying degrees of athletic ability. Bev was the last to leave, and she found herself looking at the shadowy tunnels wishing she could run back now and pull Bill from the clutches of the evil clown, hoping against hope that he would be okay until they could return for him.

"We _will_ save you," she whispered to the darkness, her eyes hooded in sadness.

She didn't acknowledge the feeling they had all shared but refused to voice aloud: that this was the last time they would know the way back to Pennywise's cavernous lair, that the entrance would soon become shrouded in the fogginess of a bad dream that one eventually denies was ever real to begin with.

Squashing down the ominous feelings inside her, Beverly Marsh turned and climbed out after the other Losers.

* * *

In the burrows of the nightmare, Bill Denbrough was helpless, as Georgie reached reluctantly for the paper boat, running through the rain towards his brother but too late to save him.

His face was pushed in the mud as the Bowers gang attacked Stan.

He was thrown against a wall, as Alvin Marsh advanced on his daughter.

He couldn't stop the werewolf from ripping Richie apart.

Or the mummy from encasing Ben in its bandages, suffocating him to death.

He failed to prevent Eddie from overdosing on real medication.

And Mike's pleading eyes burned into his soul as the giant bird dragged him away.

 _Please... please make it stop..._

An infinite series of horrible scenarios tortured Bill's fragile mind, each one tearing a little piece of his heart away. His friends had always been his power - and now that power was being used against him in the most sadistic way. And while most of the scenarios were about his friends getting hurt, not all of them were. Pennywise had thrown in some where the primary theme was just him torturing Bill, for the fun of it. Those were bad too, as they introduced his innocent young mind to the darkest depths of humanity, drawn from the clown's millennia of experience with how good humans could be at inflicting pain on one another.

But the creature that had come to know itself as Pennywise had never really tortured a human in this prolonged way before, had never had a true nemesis _quite_ so hated, and so the consequences were largely unknown. For all that the clown considered himself an expert in the study of the demented humans that ran rampant across the planet, he was partly wrong in his prediction of what Bill would become by the time he awoke again. Yes, he would be broken by the false memories of what had happened to his friends and family, and he would come to believe that they were truly dead, _gone from the world forever_ , and that it had been his fault. He would harbour a great deal of fear of Pennywise, indeed. But the result of this torture on Bill would also have other effects, ones that Pennywise had not expected.

The human brain is on one hand excellent at dealing with traumatic or painful events, because on small scales it allows for repression, so that it is possible to move on and, to some degree, forget the details of the bad experience. On large scales, when the event is particularly traumatic, the trauma can instead echo throughout a person's life, affecting them daily in various ways such that they never really truly move on. An experience as a child can very likely transform the fate of the adult they become, for the better or worse.

What Pennywise had done to Bill was make him live through horrific experiences on replay, and while they may have been in reality dreams (rather, _nightmares_ ), his sleeping mind was unable to tell the difference between what was real and what was imaginary. So with every piece of his heart that disintegrated at the sight of his friends falling before him, it was replaced not with the light that had defined his character, but with fragments of darkness that were slowly but surely changing the boy from the brave yet ultimately naive leader he had once been.

The thing he would become at the other end of all this was _far_ from the beloved and mourned leader of the Losers Club - to those who had known him, he would barely be even a shadow of his former self.

Not that they would remember him, though.

* * *

It was not easy to explain Georgie's sudden appearance, back from the dead.

The hospital staff had immediately alerted the Denbroughs, their suspicious eyes trained on the Losers, but to their credit they did rush Georgie to treatment as fast as they could. From the bits and pieces Ben could put together from hushed adult conversations taking place around them, it sounded like Georgie had been stabilised and would be okay. This was a big relief to the six of them, for at least that part of their mission had been achieved now.

They'd kept their promise to Bill.

They had not, however, been fully prepared for the Denbroughs' inquisition into what had happened. And, importantly, for the piercing questions about where their eldest son was. _Ironic really_ , thought Ben, since they'd barely paid Bill any attention since the disappearance of Georgie. He knew that trying to put his broken family back together had certainly been one of the motivations for Bill to search so hard for Georgie.

The vague answers they could give Bill's parents were hardly satisfying either - they'd already decided amongst themselves that it wasn't worth it to try and convince the adults of the real reason Georgie had disappeared. They'd never believed them before, and they certainly wouldn't now. The grown-ups couldn't even see the effects of It all around them, so how could they _possibly_ understand what they were really dealing with?

The conclusion that the adults came to, on their own, was that Georgie must have been attacked by a wild animal, and washed into the sewers. Then, somehow he survived for months down there, living off of food scraps he found, until the children had luckily found him while exploring. Bill had gotten lost in the sewers, but would likely return soon once he found his way out.

That was their conclusion, and the Losers found it simplest to just go along with it. It wasn't like they could offer a good alternative. It was almost as if the adults had forgotten about all the other kids currently missing, and were so desperate to escape the narrative of a crazed child-abducting serial killer that they would latch on to any other explanation, no matter how fanciful.

Eventually, the six of them were sent home, the questioning finally done. It wasn't until the next afternoon that they could return to the hospital, and wrangle their way in to see how Georgie was doing. The Denbroughs seemed reluctant to let them in, but they finally agreed after seeing Stan's earnest expression pleading with them to allow them to check on their friend's younger brother. Stan always did have a way with the adults, being the most mature of their group.

The afternoon sunlight filtered in through the dusty blinds of the small hospital room, illuminating Georgie's pale face. He looked better than when they'd rescued him, but still worse for wear - not surprisingly given the months trapped down in the sewers with Pennywise. His honey brown eyes, staring out the window with the pensiveness of someone much older than his six years old, jumped to them as they entered the room, searched amongst them for the obvious missing person that he wanted to see more than anyone else in the world.

"He's really gone," Georgie said in a small voice, his blonde hair darker than they recalled. They looked at each other, not sure how much he knew. How much he remembered. He did look a little confused at the six older children gathered around him, and Bev suddenly realised it was because he only recognised a few of them, the ones who had been friends with Bill before... before it all happened. He didn't know Bev, Mike or Ben's faces - only Stan, Richie and Eddie.

So, Bev nudged Eddie forward, as a familiar face that Georgie could relate to.

"Hey Georgie..." Eddie said nervously, sitting on the bed next to him. Georgie's gaze focused on him, his eyes shiny with the threat of tears.

"Where's Billy?" he said timidly, immediately addressing the unspoken awkwardness hanging in the room. It was clear that his parents had not given any kind of decent explanation for his brother's absence. Perhaps they'd even told him that Bill was on the way, in the hope of avoiding the reality of the situation.

"Er... how much do you remember?" Eddie asked, glancing back at the others. Georgie's forehead wrinkled, his eyes filling with fear, as his young mind brought back the last memories before everything went dark.

"The yellow eyes..." he whispered fearfully. "And _teeth_... I thought it was an animal."

They didn't want to push the boy to relive something that was clearly very traumatic, but somehow in their hearts it was important to know whether he remembered who the yellow eyes belonged to. It was the only way to make sure he would understand why Bill wasn't here with them now.

"The clown," Georgie continued softly, before they could say anything, his eyes welling up. "He said he was my friend. That he'd give me back my boat. But then he-" The boy trailed off, his eyes dropping to his bandaged limb. He shivered. "It was a monster."

"We've seen It too," Richie said quietly. Georgie looked at him with worried eyes, suddenly the threat of the monster clown in the sewers seemed all the more real. His parents had gotten some way in convincing him that actually it had just been a wild animal after all, and maybe his childish imagination had conjured up the creature in the faded jester suit with the glinting eyes.

"Georgie," Bev stepped forward. "My name's Bev, your brother and I were... close friends."

She didn't notice Ben flinch a little at her words, as her attention was focused on Georgie.

"Hi, Bev," Georgie said warily. It seemed his encounter with Pennywise had reinforced his apprehension towards strangers, probably for the better.

Bev smiled at him sadly, a bittersweet twisting of her lips. She would have liked to meet Georgie under other circumstances, in a different time and place where none of this had happened.

"You were missing for a long time," she said. "Bill was looking for you. Even when everyone else gave up, he didn't. He was convinced you were out there somewhere and we could find you. He was the one who made us go searching."

Georgie looked confused, his head tilted.

"But you _found_ me," he said, suddenly brightly. "So where is he now?"

Bev hesitated, looking to Richie for help.

"Georgie, you remember the clown, right?" Richie started, watching the younger boy carefully. Georgie nodded, eyes wide again with fear. His left hand drifted subconsciously towards his right arm. Thankfully, the painkillers meant that all he felt of his missing limb was a distant numbness.

"Well... uh..." Richie trailed off. "Bill made a deal with him."

"A deal?" Georgie blinked. "What kind of deal?"

They were all quiet then, not really sure how to say the words that needed to be said. Stan bit his lip, meeting Mike's questioning eyes and shaking his head firmly, he wasn't going to be the one to tell Georgie. Finally, Eddie spoke up.

"A deal to save you." Eddie's voice shook a little. They weren't sure Georgie would understand exactly what he meant by that, but the young boy realised instantly the truth behind Eddie's words.

"Billy's with the _clown_?" he whispered in a horrified voice.

"We're gonna get him back," Bev assured quickly. "We'll find him and rescue him. But he told us to make sure you were safe first, to get you to a hospital. He was really worried about you, Georgie. He told us... he said to say he loves you."

Bev's voice broke off in a choked sob, remembering Bill's last words to them. His green eyes, filled with sadness and determination, as the clown's gloved hand dug tightly into his neck.

"But I lost the boat he made me," Georgie mumbled miserably, eyes dark with regret. "She floated away, and then she was gone. Billy would be okay if I hadn't lost her..."

"No, this isn't your fault," Ben interjected firmly. "This is all because of that thing... _Pennywise_." He said the last word with disgust, feeling cold hatred for the monster that had stolen so many children from Derry.

Georgie looked up at Ben hopefully.

"You'll find Billy, then, right? You'll stop the clown?"

"Yeah, Georgie," Ben nodded, wanting to believe he was telling the truth. "That's the plan."

"Okay good," Georgie said, suddenly seeming very tired. "I wanna make a new boat with Bill. This time, we'll sail it together..."

He drifted off, his eyes closing. He was clearly still recovering, and their conversation had worn him out. It was unclear to them what would happen to his arm in the long term, and he had suffered a lot of blood loss, but still there seemed no reason to believe that he wouldn't make a full recovery in the not too distant future. They were all very glad about that. Bill's sacrifice had not been in vain - he really had saved his younger brother.

In the days to come, they kept to their word, and they returned to the tunnels again and again to search for the entrance to Pennywise's lair. The sense of being watched and the darkness that had once haunted those watery depths were gone, and sometimes they wondered why they'd ever been scared to be down there at all. But even with the best navigation skills of Mike and Ben combined, they found themselves wandering in circles, unable to make progress and drifting ever further away from their captive friend.

They began to lose hope, and the loss of that hope gave Pennywise's dark magic even more power, and before long they started to slowly forget why they were even searching in the first place. In the weeks following, they gradually lost the feeling of searching for someone, for something at all, and Bill's face began to fade from their memories. They returned for days after that, but their mission down there began to morph into something else entirely, into a quest of exploring and charting the unknown, discovering what lay under the quiet and peaceful town of Derry.

And then, one day, Bill was gone. From each of their memories, even Georgie, who was left only with the vague sensation that he lost something very, _very_ , important to him, something very dear, which he came to attribute over time to the loss of his right arm even though deep within him he knew it was something more than that.

And down below, in the darkest hollows of the caverns beneath Derry, the creature slept on, biding its time until it would be once again stirred from its slumber to feed.


	4. Chapter 4

_Note: here is another installment in the one-shot that is rapidly turning into a multi-chapter series! :p It took a bit longer because I wanted to think through various things about what the future arc would look like and which scenes would occur in this chapter. I haven't made as much progress in reading the book as I'd have liked, but this is keeping up with where I'm at. You can think of this as a parallel timeline, where many things occur the same as the book but obviously with a few key changes! In terms of what the future Losers look like, imagine what you like, but I'm drawing my descriptions from a cute bit of trivia on IMDB where the actors (supposedly) named who they think should play their future selves. Haven't been able to track down the original reference, but anyway - in this chapter, Mike would be played by Chadwick Boseman and Stan would be played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. For Georgie, after some deliberation, I picked Julian Morris. Thank you to every awesome person who reviewed the last chapter! I really appreciate your feedback. If you read this, and like it, and want it to continue, then please let me know! Your reviews are the reason I keep writing :) Hope you like the new chapter!_

* * *

In the past, the awakening had been decided by a local event close to the heart of Derry. Riots, floods, violence, storms... all kinds of natural and unnatural disasters stirred the creature from its deep slumber beneath the paved streets. The awakening came particularly strongly when hatred ran high, directed towards whatever minority group was the flavour of the day. Pennywise didn't care: fear was the best fuel for hatred, after all, so where there was hatred there was plenty of fear to go around for him to feed off.

This time was _different_ , though. The pulses of fear that rippled through the caverns beneath Derry came from much further away, but instead of a hundred voices rising up in fear, it was thousands. It was hundreds of thousands, millions upon millions. The world was rife with fear, and for the creature, fear was power. It sensed the violence driven by fear, the burning hatred for anyone associated with the unknown and the unfamiliar, the harsh suspicion aimed at some of the weakest in society. Violence in the name of religion, violence in spite of religion, violence against those who followed a religion. The persistent ability of the foolish humans to respond to fear, to question those who knew but believe those who lied. In the end, it worked in Pennywise's favour: the humans were more scared than they'd ever been before.

He rose from his sleep cheerfully with an inhuman cackle, revelling in the fearful world of the 21st century that he'd emerged into. If Derry had been a microcosm for the world in the past, then it seemed now its poison had spread well beyond the town borders into every corner of the planet. It gave the clown an immense surge of strength, more than ever before. He felt invigorated by what was to come, by the thrill of the hunt he would enjoy for the next months.

Aimed at no one in particular, he shrieked with happiness, delighted at the turn of events. This time was going to be lots of fun.

And then, without further thought, he set off towards the unsuspecting world above to satisfy his ravenous appetite. It didn't occur to him to check the status of his favourite captive prisoner, and if he had, his eagerness may have been quenched by some degree of apprehension.

In the main cavern, floating high above the ground, a figure stirred.

* * *

"While they were originally derived to help predict the weather, the Lorenz equations have since been studied in particular for this chaotic behaviour you see here on the board, with some solutions tending towards the butterfly wing pattern of the Lorenz strange attractor. They highlight the notion that a small change in initial conditions can in turn generate a massive difference in the final result."

He paused, chalk in his hand, looking across at his early-morning audience. There were varying degrees of glazed-over in their eyes, though a few in the first couple rows seemed particularly enamoured with the Lorenz examples he was detailing on the board. He glanced at the clock to the side, which was hovering around five to the hour, and decided to call it.

"Alright, we'll stop there and resume next time on other representations of chaos. Chapter 4, along with the end of chapter questions, to be discussed at the start of the next lecture."

The sudden shuffling of papers and books, alongside the loud clunks made as the fold-down wooden benches were released from the weight of sitting students, never ceased to amaze him with how quickly it filled the room as soon as the class was dismissed. Something supernatural about the reactions of students to the end of class, for sure.

He was stirred from his distracted thoughts by someone standing in front of him shyly.

"Professor Denbrough," she began.

"Dr," he corrected, smiling at the address. "Not professor."

"Dr," she smiled back. "I was going through the exercises from Chapter 4 already actually, and I didn't understand question 3... my answer doesn't match the one at the end of the book."

He nodded for her to show the question and her working. She held up her notebook, and he skimmed over it, and looked back at the answer in the book. He raised an eyebrow. There was a missing square root in the working of the textbook.

"Yep, you're right," he confirmed. "The answer in the book is wrong, well spotted!"

She beamed at him, proud of herself, and opened her mouth to say something else. But it was at that exact moment that his mobile phone buzzed in his pocket. Confused as to who would be calling him on his mobile at 10 in the morning, he pulled it out, staring at the screen in puzzlement.

 _+1-207-_ _287-1116 calling_

An American number? He glanced at the clock again, it was the evening there. He recognised the region code too... _Maine_. Inexplicably, a feeling of dread came through him. He hadn't been back to his hometown since before he left for college, and after that, he'd moved overseas to Australia so fast there hadn't been any time to even consider dropping in. Without giving it too much more thought, he answered the phone.

"Hello?"

"Georgie?"

The long-repressed name shot through him like an icy bullet, numbing his insides instantly. Nobody called him that anymore. He almost felt physically ill, his brain suddenly foggy and confused. Who was even calling him?

"Georgie," came the voice again, softer. "It's Mike."

 _Mike..._ In a rush, memories flooded back to him of a tall grinning boy with dark curly hair. Memories that hadn't crossed his mind for years. Of the group of kids who'd for some reason always been there looking out for him as he grew up, even though he was a few years younger than them. He remembered their hangout place, and how they'd always let him join them, joking that having seven in their group of Losers had seemed more natural anyway. Until Bev had left to live with an aunt, then Richie to California, and then one by one each of them slowly moved away, himself included. And despite their friendship in his younger years, somehow the thought of them hadn't really surfaced in his mind since he left Derry behind.

"Gosh, Mike, I'm sorry," he managed.

"It's okay, Georgie," Mike said in an understanding voice. George suddenly had the distinct impression that Mike had had this conversation before, as if he expected him to not remember him at first.

"It's George," he mumbled without thinking, flexing the artificial limb of his right arm. He'd been George Denbrough since his first day at college, subconsciously shedding the affectionate nickname Georgie in the same way he'd shed the memories of his childhood.

"Oh," Mike sounded vaguely surprised. "George, then."

"What's going on, Mike?" he prompted, aware of the student's curious eyes on him. He turned away from her to face the chalkboard. "It's been... _forever_."

There was a pause, much longer than could be attributed to the time delay of electromagnetic signals passing from Derry to Sydney, and it was heavy. A bit of noise crackled on the line, though maybe it was at Mike's end.

"Look, Georgie, I wish I didn't have to be calling you about this," Mike said regretfully, slipping back to his previous name without even noticing. "But _it's_ happening again."

He put a strange emphasis on the word "it", and George's brow furrowed in confusion. What could he mean by that? George stared at the chalky calculations scribbled on the board, his mind drifting back to a time when he was just a boy, when he'd been chasing a paper boat down a flooded street, a time when he'd been soon after wracked with the most unimaginable pain in the world as a piece of him was torn away by the savage teeth of a wild animal.

Not a wild animal.

Not an animal at all.

 _IT._

"Shit," he breathed, his face draining of colour. All at once he remembered the silver eyes flashing in the darkness, the blood-red lips parting in a sick grin as the foolish Georgie reached out for the paper boat his father had made for him earlier that afternoon. He remembered being dragged into the sewers, the whispers in his ear promising a terrible fate, the foul water choking his lungs as he breathed it in. The blood dripping from the place where his arm had been, but he couldn't feel it, couldn't feel much at that time. A large cavern, which he only saw through foggy eyes, his vision clouding from the head injury due to a collision with a road sign above ground. And then afterwards a darkness thicker than anything he could imagine, anything he could even begin to describe (despite his training in the physics of the world around him), a darkness so black he just wandered lost in it for what seemed like an eternity.

Until the Losers rescued him. He couldn't remember the details now, though they threatened to return like a flood of grey water through his mind, but somehow they'd gotten him back from the monstrous clown that lived in the sewers. They'd rescued him, and then in the later days they'd all made a pact that they would return one day if it ever happened again. Ben seemed to think it would be sometime when they were all adults, quipping about history repeating itself. There was something very important locked in all this misty recollection. Was it so important to them to protect the future generations of children from the clown? He supposed so... But the months had passed and the memory of that time had so rapidly faded from them all, lost in the golden rays of their summer together.

 _Had it even been real at all?_

"Georgie - will you come?"

He stared at his phone like it was poisonous. To go back to that forsaken place was suicide, of that he was sure. Mid-semester exams were next week, and he was supervising. There was a sailing event on the weekend that he was a core member of, as part of the university team. He had to sit on an early career researcher panel across the Science faculty on Monday. A proposal deadline for supercomputing time on Wednesday. A million and one reasons to hang up the phone and wipe all memory of Mike and the Losers and that god-forsaken clown from his mind, _again_ , this time for good.

George closed his eyes, feeling a long-absent throbbing return to the place where his right arm met its manufactured counterpart.

"Yes, I'll come," he said numbly. They exchanged a few words about the details, and then Mike was gone.

"Sir?" A faint voice broke his reverie, and he looked back towards the undergraduate student as if awakening from a dream.

"Are you okay?" she asked, looking nervously at his phone. "Was it bad news?"

"Something like that." He rapidly gathered his things, shut his laptop and disconnected it from the AV system. "Sorry - I have to go."

Without another word, he left the stunned student in the empty lecture hall and made his way back to his office. He barely saw anyone as he passed through the halls, a sharp contrast to his normal friendly self who greeted people as he went. Right now, he couldn't deal with anything or anyone but this weighty news ripped out of his past and into his otherwise peaceful present existence.

Thankfully, his office mate was out somewhere (probably getting coffee, Australians were obsessed with their coffee) and he had the room to himself. He walked to the window and stared out across the green square, where people were joyfully tossing a frisbee between them. _If only they knew the things he had seen...!_ The things that lurked in the night waiting for weakness to show. The things that exploited the vulnerability and innocence of children in the worst imaginable way.

But no, that wasn't possible, that wasn't sensible, there wasn't _really_ anything under your bed.

At least that was what the grown-ups would say. Was he becoming his six year old self again? _Grown-ups_? That was what he was now, not a kid anymore. An image conjured in his mind of a skinny boy with wild curly hair and a wry smile. Stanley Uris, the last person he'd lost contact with after he left Derry. What was he doing now? Something in e-business or so... the last time they'd talked had been an inane conversation about the stats of some underwater legendary Pokémon that Stan was a huge fan of, while George had been defending a dragon one. Why did he remember _that_ , of all things?

He fumbled with his phone and scrolled through the address book, finding a number he'd not remembered he even had in the first place. Without thinking, he dialled, seeking once again the voice of reason from one of his longest and most forgotten friends.

The phone rang for several seconds, before a woman's voice picked up.

"Hi, is Stan there please?" George asked politely. He assumed it was Patty but it has been so long, he didn't really want to assume anything.

"Oh sure, he's a popular one tonight," laughed the voice at the other end. He could hear the traces of a game show playing in the background, an audience cheering and clapping along. She barely covered the mouthpiece as she yelled in the background.

"Stan, before your bath, there's someone on the phone for you!"

There was nothing on the line for an awkwardly long time, some muffled voices, then a faint thudding of feet on the floor growing louder.

"H-hello?"

It may have been years, but his voice hadn't changed that much. Though it did sound a bit hollow, maybe that was something to do with the phone connection.

"Stan!" George said brightly, momentarily forgetting the reason for his call. "It's George Denbrough."

" _Georgie_...?" came a halted whisper, not sounding like the Stan he remembered at all, but like someone he didn't have it in his heart to correct.

"Yeah, it's Georgie," he said. "Mike called me too."

Another silence.

"I was just... going to have a bath," Stan mumbled. "To clear my head."

George cocked his head to the side, a little confused by the strange tone in Stan's voice. It almost echoed of... guilt? Like being caught in the middle of something. He remembered suddenly, clear as day, when Stan came to the hospital and signed his temporary replacement arm: "To the little brother we all wish was ours, get well soon." George had never had any siblings after all, and Stan in particular had played the role of big brother so often. Sometimes George had felt as if he really did have a big brother watching out for him, thanks to his time with the Losers.

"Stan, you'll be there, right?" George asked, his voice shaking a little. Something deep down in his chest told him Stan hadn't planned to come, and George couldn't bear the thought of trying to face the clown without him.

He could hear Stan breathing, heavily, but there was no response.

"Mike needs all of us," George pressed, a slight pleading in his voice. "Please, come... I need you too."

"George," Stan said weakly. "I don't think I can face it again. He almost got me last time... I still have the scars. I thought we were done with all that, I thought the promise we made to Mike was just... just a kid's promise."

"We all lost a lot that summer," George acknowledged, hearing Stan sniffle a little and wishing he was closer to his old friend instead of thousands of kilometres away. "But we're still here. Others... _aren't_. We owe it to them to help make sure there are no more sacrifices to this monster."

"What if we can't...?"

"We _will_ ," George said firmly. "We will defeat it. You were just kids last time and look how far you got. You saved me. He won't even realise we're coming until it's too late."

Stan heaved a huge sigh, and George could almost hear wheels turning in his head. He imagined his friend standing near the stairs of his house, deliberating with his characteristic skeptical expression, but he couldn't have hoped to imagine the visions of razors dancing temptingly in front of Stanley Uris' eyes.

"Okay, Georgie... _Okay_. I'll be there."

"Thanks, Stan," George said, feeling like somehow this was the biggest thing he'd ever asked Stan for. "I promise we will be okay."

"You can't promise that, kiddo," said Stan wistfully. "But it'll be good to see you again."

"You too. I'll see you there in a couple days."

"Yeah."

The phone line went dead, and George found himself staring at the poster on his wall. The Crab Nebula, remnants of a long-dead star traced in all the colours of the rainbow, a spinning neutron star in its core. One of his favourite astronomical objects. He kind of wished he could gather his friends and teleport them all there, somewhere far away, to keep them safe. But really, he knew they all needed to be in Derry if they had a ghost of a chance of fighting the monster that lived in the sewers. Maybe this time, now that he wasn't a prisoner, he could play a part in the effort to bring Pennywise down for good.

After all, what arsenal could the clown possibly bring this time against 7 adults instead of 7 terrified children?

* * *

 _The breeze was cool on his face, even while the intense Australian sun beat down on him from above. He felt the sea spray against his cheeks and closed his eyes. He'd always been happiest on the sea, riding the waves with the wind in his sails and an open horizon before him. And the weather here in Sydney was almost always nice, making the water sparkle in the brightest shades of blue he'd ever seen._

 _As he passed the rocky heads that separated Sydney Harbour from the open sea, the water became a bit choppier, but that was to be expected as the wind picked up. The white peaks of the waves beckoned him, and suddenly he felt like going further than ever before, maybe to the edge where the azure sky met the sea. Freedom, he had always thought, looked like a lot like this._

 _But suddenly it darkened, and storm clouds began to roll in. That was unusual for October. He looked around him, nervously, as lightning flashed in the heavy black clouds above. This storm had really come out of nowhere, and before he knew it, the rain was pouring down from the skies above, drenching him and the sails of his small boat. The wind whipped around him, and visibility dropped to almost nothing. He squinted through the rain and mist, trying to figure out which way would take him quickest back to shore. He had a gut instinct, but in this kind of weather, it was difficult to say for sure._

 _The lightning struck again, and suddenly his attention was drawn to the other end of his sail boat. The visibility was tough even there, but not so much to miss the shadowy figure standing at the edge of the boat, balancing impossibly on the tip, long wet hair shrouding the face from view. A tall figure, with scraggly brown hair, dressed in what seemed like rags that were too small a long time ago. The lightning cracked, and the eyes rose to lock onto George's own._

 _Dark green, he could just make out, belonging to a face he'd never seen before, and yet there was something so familiar about these eyes. Something that reminded him of warm orange lights, distant music, and the smell of paraffin. But these were only the tendrils of a memory that refused to surface, and his chest ached at even the thought of it. The green eyes narrowed, and the figure blinked, and suddenly he was staring into the coldest, emptiest silver eyes imaginable._

 _He felt scared, alone and vulnerable. As he watched, the figure's mouth twisted into a haunted grin, teeth dark and dripping with blood, amidst seemingly endless rows of sharp pointed teeth._

 _He screamed._

* * *

George jolted awake, chest heaving and his hair matted to his damp forehead.

"Sir?"

An air steward was holding out a damp warm towel, concern etched across his face. George dropped his eyes to read the name tag pinned to his shirt: _Amine_.

"You were... er, stirring in your sleep," Amine said politely. Glancing around at the faces illuminated by their in-flight screens, with many passengers of his cabin darting sideways looks in his direction, George guessed he had been less stirring and more shouting in his sleep.

"Sorry," he said apologetically. "Bad dream."

He accepted the towel, and wiped his face with it, grateful at least that the seat next to him was empty on this flight from Sydney to Los Angeles. Amine waited patiently, and then took the towel back.

"Flights often unsettle people," he said with a charming smile. "If you need anything, sir, let me know."

"Thanks," George said, smiling back but knowing exactly where the source of his unsettled nightmares stemmed from. And it wasn't being on a plane, he did that plenty as an researcher. It was the ominous horizon approaching, a fear of what awaited him at the other end. He didn't know where that shadowy yet familiar figure had come from, but maybe it was just another representation of the clown eating away at his subconscious. He turned his head to stare out the oval plane window, resting his forehead against it. They were flying towards nightfall, and in the eastern sky he could see the hazy lavender of the Earth's shadow rising slowly, tinting the sky with a mix of pastel hues. It seemed fitting that they were flying into the night, it suited how he felt about returning to his hometown.

And he couldn't help but wonder how many more sunsets he would live to see.


	5. Chapter 5

_Note: Finally, here is the next chapter! Finished it on a long drive home today. Sorry for the delay, birthday celebrations got a little in the way :) I was also thinking a lot about which direction to go with certain aspects, and what to cover with this chapter, as well as rewatching the new film. Still haven't made my way through the book though :p I suck. Thank you once again, *very much*, to everyone who has taken the time to leave a review - it really makes me happy that people are enjoying this AU rewrite and I hope you continue to like it! Let me know what you think :D_

* * *

 _These streets are yours  
_ _You can keep them  
_ _I don't want them  
_ _They pull me back and I surrender  
_ _To the memories I run from  
_ _Oh, we have paved these streets  
_ _With moments of defeat...  
_ \- These Streets, Bastille

 _Tasty, tasty children... tasty, tasty fear..._

The clown hummed to himself, singing the words over and over in his head as he made his way back down to the central cavern. He was returning from a birthday party, where he'd made himself the guest of honour and dragged five little girls to their doom in the sewers. It was surprising what children would believe for the sake of a balloon or two, and even more surprising that parents would leave their children alone in the middle of a forest to have a tea party. Now, he cheerfully dragged their bodies back, holding each tiny wrist in his gloved hand like so many stringed balloons.

He giggled to himself.

At least two of the girls were dead, the other three were barely alive. They would recover a little while they floated, and later make a good snack in between his ongoing hunt for fresh prey. Their fear had been so very delicious, but it was raw in the sense that it hadn't be cultivated properly. He was still testing the limits of his newly developed power, which was growing steadily in response to the echoes of fear reverberating across the small planet. The last time he'd awoke, less powerful than he was now, he'd made sure to torture his prey for several days, scaring them in small doses at a time but letting them escape, so that when he finally came to take them they would feel the maximum fear. It was a strategy that had been going pretty well that summer, until his encounter with the Losers.

He growled, just at the thought of those annoying children. Then he remembered his captive, and suddenly felt a bit brighter. He'd been so hungry upon awakening that he didn't have time to check on the meal he'd been saving for 28 years. But now he could spend some time assessing how his experiment had gone, and hopefully have himself a most satisfying dessert.

The cavern opened up before him as he entered, and he looked with pride upon his towering pile of souvenirs. The work of several hundred years, and he remembered every victim vividly. His eyes scanned the floating bodies for his most prized possession, and narrowed when he couldn't locate it. A muffled noise ahead of him drew his attention downwards once more, and he dropped his latest catch in pure shock. The bodies splashed into the shallow water, like discarded toys.

In the wreckage of his old circus carriage, curled up in front of the hellish flaming backdrop, was exactly the possession he'd been searching for. A mop of ratty brown hair buried in his knees, Bill Denbrough had his arms wrapped around his legs, the remnants of his jeans torn and frayed like his dirty raglan tee. He was sobbing, his thin shoulders shaking, and somehow it offended Pennywise that the boy hadn't noticed his presence. He approached carefully, eyes never leaving his dreaded enemy. As he got nearer, the boy looked up, as if sensing his presence. His clouded green eyes focused on the clown, and he shrieked, scooting backwards into the worn wooden backdrop of the carriage. His back slammed against it, and he looked around, wide-eyed, for an escape.

Pennywise seized his chance, and swooped in until his face was inches from the boy's. Bill stopped dead, frozen, eyes scanning the clown as if searching for something.

"You're not real," he rasped, breathing heavily. He sounded as if he wanted to really believe that was true. Pennywise scowled.

"Oh, I'm real enough for you now, Billy boy," he drawled, placing both gloved hands on the wooden wall either side of Bill, to stop him from escaping. But beneath his unaffected veneer, he was disturbed. He had suspended the boy for 28 years, in both space and time. And yet somehow the boy in front of him, who should have been the same thirteen year old from 1989, had clearly aged. Maybe only a few years, maybe a little more, but he was definitely older. And that meant that his old nemesis, William Denbrough, had managed to wriggle his slimy way out, if only partly, of the wonderful cage that Pennywise had built just for him.

"No, you're just a nightmare, like all the rest," Bill cried, covering his face with his hands. He was clearly terrified, and yet at the same time convinced that none of what was happening was real. Which meant that at some point in the last 28 years, he'd realised something about the nature of his torture. Maybe it hadn't worked as well as Pennywise had hoped. There was one way to find out though, whether his choice all those years ago had been worth it.

He breathed in, sensing the aura around Bill, and smelling an intense aroma of fear such that he'd never detected before. His teeth rippled and he wrapped one hand around the back of the boy's neck to pull him closer, sinking his teeth into the welcoming flesh. Bill screamed and tried to push him away, unsuccessfully. As the blood flowed, Pennywise was momentarily blinded by the taste, and then as he became aware again he realised that Bill had indeed become the most delicious prey he'd ever tasted in his entire existence. The fear was so matured in him, and so much a part of who he was now, that it defined him. But there was something else there too, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. A darkness, something distant and shrouded and ominous.

Then, suddenly, Pennywise was standing on a boat in a storm, lightning flashing around him and the air thick with sea spray, staring through Bill's eyes towards a horrified brown-haired man with a prosthetic right arm.

 _Georgie!_

Pennywise jolted back, away from Bill, teeth dripping with blood but eyes filled with a most unpleasant and rare emotion for the clown: _fear_. How had Bill gained power over the mindscape? The boy moaned, his hands grasping at his bloodied neck, curling up again away from Pennywise. Pennywise suddenly grew suspicious of another old nemesis that he'd long since dismissed, but surely there would be no interference here by that one... Unsettled, he observed the trembling heap.

 _Maybe he could use this._

Yes, that was what he should do. There was no need to be afraid of Bill, he was _his_ , after all. No one would be coming to rescue him. And the foolish Losers were on their way back here, he could sense that much. They still didn't remember everything, and certainly not the fact that they'd left their beloved leader behind in the sewers to rot for the last few decades. He would use Bill alongside his own power, to take down the Losers, and then once they were disposed of for good, he would savour Bill as his final meal before returning to slumber for another 27 years or so.

"Yes, yes," he nodded to himself, grinning again, a maniacal gleam in his eyes. He would set Bill loose in the mindscape of the Losers, so that while they slept, he would terrorise them with the memories of his nightmares. And then when they awoke, Pennywise would be there to remind them that they never stood a chance at all. He'd drive them mad, completely nuts, and then when they didn't know what was real or imaginary anymore, he'd attack them with their worst fears and then devour them. No more Losers, only a seven-course meal that had been three decades in the making.

He waved his hand, and the agitated Bill slumped to the ground, unconscious. Pennywise quickly forged the links between his mind and the Losers, so that Bill's consciousness could move easily between each of the Losers' sleeping minds. It wasn't hard to do, actually. After all this time the eight of them were still connected by the faintest of threads. The memories of Bill Denbrough were buried somewhere in the Losers' sleeping subconsciouses, for as much power as Pennywise had, he could not have removed Bill entirely from their hearts.

The whole situation had suddenly gotten a lot more complicated, but Bill's unexpected powers combined with the boy's instability and confusion could be worked to his advantage. Pennywise prided himself on his adaptability, after all. The humans had changed a lot over the years, developing their lives in surprising ways. The centuries looked very little like each other, and now was the golden age of technology. All those emotions translated into electromagnetic signals, criss-crossing through the air like invisible contrails. But deep down, humanity was always the same.

Fear _always_ won.

* * *

It was funny how, after these many years, a place could still be so familiar. As much as George had tried, subconsciously or not, to forget Derry, his return to the town had awakened a deep nostalgia as he walked down the roads that had once seemed so wide. The trees had surely shrunk in the last years, because he could only remember them towering over him.

Without even thinking too hard, he found himself standing outside his old house. It had long ago become the house of a stranger, when his family moved away to Washington during his high school years. The house had always seemed too big for them anyway, with all those empty rooms. Being an only child had been pretty lonely, and he'd often wished for a sibling but it just never happened. After the attack, and the months he was missing, and the loss of his arm, his parents had always seemed on edge, waiting for another bad thing to happen or more bad news, no matter how much he tried to convince them it was fine now.

He stared up at the window that had been the spare room, now sheathed with a lace curtain that hid the contents from view. And somehow he had the weird feeling of staring up at that window before, the day _it_ happened. Of waving up at the window, even though there couldn't have been anything or anyone to wave to. No, he had waved to his dad standing on the front porch, even though the thought of his dad allowing him out in such weather seemed kind of odd in retrospect.

Lost in his foggy memory, George looked from the porch down to the curbside, following the ghost of the old waxed boat down the street. In reality, it was an almost warm sunny day in autumn, with the late afternoon sun shining down through the red falling leaves. But in George's mind, all he saw was the rain pelting down and the flimsy paper boat running further and further ahead of him.

He followed it through the streets, ironically dodging the same orange Derry Public Works signs but not in the same locations. And then there he was, standing across from _that_ sewer, watching with horror as his boat stalled, stuttered, and then floated down into the darkness of the drain.

Even now, as an adult, it was difficult for him to look too closely into the shadows of a drain entry, for the fear of what he might find there. _Stupid, really_. Or so he had thought for the last several years of amnesic ignorance. And as it had dragged him down into the darkness, he remembered screaming one last word.

 _Billy!_

George blinked in confusion. No, that hadn't been the word. Why would he even...?

 _Help me!_

He was pretty sure after all, that he'd yelled for help. But his cries had been lost to the rain. At least that was what he chose to believe, rather than the dark alternative. He'd always wondered if the darkness in Derry came from the creature, or if it was the other way around.

"Hiya Georgie!"

A pit sunk in his stomach. He raised his gaze reluctantly, hoping he wouldn't see the face he knew that voice belonged to. Bright silver eyes flashed in the darkness, and red lips widened to grin at him. A gloved hand waved a falsely cheerful hello. He looked around helplessly, hoping to find someone else to verify that there was, indeed, a clown in the sewer. But the streets were deserted. He was alone.

"Aren't ya gonna say _hello_?" Pennywise smiled darkly at him.

"So you are back," George finally managed weakly, his stomach churning. He was ashamed at the effect that the clown had on him, even now.

"What? I can't hear you... maybe you should come a little closer." The malevolent eyes gleamed at him from the drain. "I promise I won't bite... _this time_."

George winced, the memory of his arm being torn off suddenly fresh in his mind.

"You want your arm back?" Pennywise mocked, giggling. As George watched, the clown raised his hand to reveal a small child's arm in its clutches, the skin dark with trails of blood and a horrid stub of bone poking out the end.

"N-no thanks," George said, feeling ridiculous responding to the creature. What could he even say to that anyway?

Pennywise's eyes narrowed maliciously, teeth showing. A sharp pain on George's right made him look down, and he choked back a cry at the sight of a torn bloody limb poking out of his ripped shirt. His artificial arm was nowhere to be seen, and the pain was as vivid as the day it happened. The blood dripped thickly from the severed limb, pooling on the asphalt.

George dropped to his knees, clutching his arm, blinded by the pain. Suddenly, just like he did that stormy day, he felt completely and utterly alone, helpless, and such a fool. All that for a paper boat? Why had he been so scared of losing it anyway? Who would care?

"Who _indeed_..." Pennywise cocked his head, clearly fascinated. "You know, I thought you Losers would be more effort, but you're even _weaker_ than you were last time. He really _was_ your strongest link."

George looked at the clown in confusion, distracted from the pain of his arm.

"Who was?"

Pennywise just laughed, an unearthly raspy sound that made George's skin crawl.

"I could take you right now, Georgie, no one would even notice. Just like old times. One down, six to go, what do you say?" His eyes flashed yellow for a split second, and his mouth widened. George knew he should get up, knew he should turn and run away, but he was frozen to the spot, on his knees staring at the clown as it bared its teeth at him.

 _Why am I not running?_

He tried to will himself to get up, seeing the clown begin to mangle his way out of the drain towards him, twisting limbs in directions that shouldn't be physically possible. Was it really going to end right here, only hours after getting off the plane? After his optimistic hopes of contributing this time to the effort of defeating Pennywise once and for all?

"Give in, Georgie," drawled the clown, licking his lips. "It's not like you were meant to be around anyway."

 _Huh?_

"GEORGE!" shouted a voice. Suddenly someone was pulling him up from the ground, and there was honking, and screeching tires. George blinked and looked around him, surprised to find himself being dragged off the road by a very familiar someone with warm brown eyes and dark curly hair. He'd aged, but it was still obviously the same person underneath the passing years.

"Mike?"

"What on earth were you doing sitting in the middle of the road?" Mike demanded. A couple walking their corgi looked sideways at them as they passed. "Are you crazy?"

"Maybe," George murmured, looking back at the now empty drain. "I thought I saw..."

"It," Mike confirmed, suddenly understanding. "Yeah... it showed itself to me too. Always the bloody balloons." He shuddered a little.

They were safely on the pavement now, but George couldn't help a darting glance back to the sewer. And sure enough, there was a yellow balloon floating where the clown had been, covered in blood stains. A parting gift from the clown to him: it was the exact same colour as his raincoat had been that stormy afternoon. He looked to Mike, if only to ascertain that he wasn't mad, that there was really a balloon there. Mike's grim face told him all he needed to know.

"Let's get out of here," Mike said, eyes on the balloon. "To my place."

It wasn't a long walk to the side of town where Mike lived, and George had to bite his tongue against the observation he _almost_ said out loud: this had always been the poor side of town. They came to a stop outside a rundown wooden house, which had long since required maintenance. The plants in the front yard were overgrown, and everything seemed worn and tired, not totally unlike Mike himself. As if he heard George's thoughts, Mike smiled self-deprecatingly.

"I know, it's not much to look at. I've been meaning to do some work on it for a while, but things always seem to come up..."

"You never left?" George suddenly was more aware of the fact that Mike had been the only one of them who stayed in Derry. Maybe that was why he'd been the only one to truly remember everything.

"Nah... one of us had to keep watch right?" he joked, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "After what happened with Henry... I don't know, George. I guess I felt like I belonged here, and only here."

George felt a strange mix of sadness and regret, and shame that he'd not looked back once after leaving. While Mike had been here the whole time, never ever leaving their childhood behind, he'd been off living what felt suddenly like a foreign life belonging to a stranger. He'd been lecturing on chaos theory less than 48 hours ago but that felt much longer in the past. And it seemed so trivial, like he'd been living half-awake without ever knowing it. In leaving Derry and the memories of the town behind, he'd lost part of who he was. He reached out and put his hand on Mike's shoulder.

"I'm really sorry, Mike," he said sombrely. "I wish I'd been there for you like you guys were for me when I was a kid."

Mike smiled again, more genuinely this time.

"It's okay, Georgie," he said, slipping once again back to the old name despite his previous efforts. "I make a pretty good librarian as it turns out."

He opened the door and let George in, leading him to the kitchen. Inside, the house was much better kept. Everything was old, but there wasn't much dirt or dust to be seen. He'd kept it fairly tidy, but it was also very minimalistic. There were no photos or trinkets, like the ones that were normally scattered throughout homes. Mike had evidently lived quite a solitary life, staying guard at the mouth of hell waiting for the creature to resurface. It seemed like this mission had ended up defining his entire life.

George accepted the light beer Mike offered, and took a seat at the small table in the kitchen area. They clinked their bottles, cheering to their reunion despite the circumstances.

"It's weird being back," George admitted, swigging from his bottle. "If not for your call, I don't think I would have ever returned."

"Derry has that effect somehow," Mike agreed. "It was our whole world as kids, it was everything. But you grow up, and suddenly the world seems a lot bigger. And memories fade faster here. I've never known if it was the effect of Pennywise, or some odd quirk of this town."

"Yeah, I wonder what brought It here as opposed to anywhere else in the world..." George stared into the beer bottle, at the foamy amber liquid inside. He found himself also wondering how different the town, and their lives, might have been been if the clown had chosen another town than Derry. He suddenly remembered the strange things that the clown had said to him.

"Hey, has Pennywise said anything odd to you?" he asked Mike.

"Has he ever said anything sensible?" Mike laughed. When he saw that George was serious, his expression changed to concerned. "What do you mean?"

"Oh, just some things that I didn't quite understand. Like, that I wasn't meant to be around... and he seemed to talk about someone I should know, but didn't."

"Maybe he was just messing with you?" Mike shrugged. "He hasn't said anything like that to me." He paused, in thought.

Suddenly he clicked his fingers, and gestured for George to follow him. "Now that I think about it, something odd did happen about a month ago."

George followed Mike out to his backyard, which was possibly even more overgrown than the front. A small haphazard shed, seemingly self-assembled, was the goal Mike was walking towards. He opened the wooden door, reached inside and wheeled something out. George's brow furrowed in confusion at the item Mike brandished with an expectant look on his face.

It was a very old bicycle, rusting in places where it used to be silver, with a black cracked leather seat that had clearly seen a lot of use. It looked like a child's bicycle, but was a little large even for an average-sized teenager. And if it was supposed to ring a bell for George... it didn't. Even though he has a vague feeling deep down that it should.

"Anything?" Mike asked hopefully. George slowly shook his head, staring at the large lettered emblazoned on the side: SILVER. The bike's name? The company that made it?

"Sorry, Mike. What is it?"

"I don't know. I saw it in a thrift shop for $20 and something made me buy it. I thought maybe it had belonged to one of us, but I don't think that's the case. Especially if you don't recognise it either... and yet something tells me this bicycle was, and maybe still is, important."

He grimaced, looking down at the bicycle. "Or maybe it's just another red herring... I never know anymore. Maybe one of the others will recognise it."

He wheeled it back carefully into the shed and shut the door behind it.

"Well then, we've got a couple hours before dinner, wanna take a look around the old town?"

"Sure," George smiled, for a moment feeling like he was actually just here in Derry visiting a childhood friend rather than the darker truth of it all. Here, in the cool fading sunlight, it was easy to believe there was no Pennywise and no final showdown heading their way. That tonight's dinner at Jim's with all the rest was just for fun, just the gathering of old friends reminiscing about the past over the town's best pizza and pasta.

If only it were that simple.

But at least for the next few hours, George resolved to pretend it was. He pushed down the feeling in his chest that the strange words of Pennywise meant something, that the bicycle meant something, that he'd had forgotten something so very important that was right there, on the edge of his memory. That he needed to remember it urgently, for all of their sakes.

But _what_?


	6. Chapter 6

_Note: A quicker update than before! This chapter actually ended up being a bit longer than I expected. If you've read the book (still haven't finished it, I still suck) or seen the 1990 movie, then bits and pieces of this chapter will be familiar, but with a slightly different take on everything. I apologise for any gross inconsistencies though! In this chapter, you're of course welcome to picture whoever you like for the characters! But in terms of writing them, I kept in mind (as mentioned before) the "future" versions identified by the cast of this year's film: Chadwick Boseman (Mike), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Stan), Jessica Chastain (Bev), Chris Pratt (Ben), Bill Hader (Richie), and Jake Gyllenhaal (Eddie). For Georgie, as before, Julian Morris. Slightly-older-Bill, who made an appearance last chapter, is roughly around 18 or so, but basically just an older version of Jaeden Lieberher. Casting him as Christian Bale seemed a bit odd (obviously with this version as well), so I'll wave the AU flag and run away. Thank you again to everyone who left a review for the previous chapter! Seeing your reviews spurred me on to finish this chapter, knowing people were waiting to find out what happened next :) I hope you like this installment - look forward to hearing your thoughts! x_

* * *

They were the first to arrive at the dinner, not accidentally.

Mike had wanted to make sure everything was in order, and that the reservation had gone through, and that it was all ready for when the others arrived. He'd also insisted on bringing the mysterious old bicycle with them, chaining it up in a side alley next to Jim's with a firm belief that one of their group would surely recognise it. George believed in Mike, he really did, but he was also beginning to sense a degree of instability in his old friend, grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to try and make sense of their strange fate, looking for anything that would in the slightest help them defeat the evil entity waiting for them in the sewers. And George wasn't foolish enough to believe that spending the last few decades in Derry wouldn't do that to anyone, especially those wise enough to know the threat of Pennywise.

Now, they waited in a small alcove room that Jim himself had set aside for them, the owner smiling warmly and remarking how Mike was one of his best customers and it was so nice for him to be dining in rather than leaving with the usual small takeaway boxes. They'd been given the best group area, George had figured out quickly, as it was styled in a very Mediterranean theme with paintings of Italian landscapes decorating the white-painted walls. It was separated from the general dining areas, and almost private. Which was good, because the things they would likely be discussing would be far from normal polite dinner conversation.

Mike was standing anxiously near a golden-tinted Madonna statue, clearly on edge as they waited for the others to arrive. He had been pretty confident that everyone should have made it to Derry by now, but he'd wanted to give them their space while they processed what it meant to be back here. This dinner was the first contact they would all have with each other. It had been Mike who organised the bookings for them all at the only decent hotel in Derry, _The Derry Inn_. George had checked in earlier that afternoon, before embarking on his nostalgic trip back to his old family house, but he hadn't seen any of the others there at the time. It almost seemed like destiny that they would each arrive at different times, alone, lost in their own slowly-returning memories.

"Do you think they remember where this place is?" Mike wondered aloud, nervous. "I didn't send the address..."

"Mike, everyone uses Google now anyway," George reassured him. "They'll be here, it's only five past the hour."

"But what if-"

" _Mike_ ," George repeated. "It'll be fine."

He was genuinely looking forward to seeing everyone, despite the situation they were in. The walk around the town with Mike had been fun overall, as they visited the sites that had been so important to them as kids. The old movie theatre, the pharmacy, the candy store... and then there were other places, like the wreckage of the ironworks or the god-forsaken shell of a house on 29 Neibolt Street. What a shame that no one had knocked _it_ down and flattened it into the ground, in all these many years. It was in an even worse state now, and yet something, maybe the clown's magic, had protected it from being demolished and turned into something better.

"You ratbags," came a voice from the side, and George followed the sound to see a familiar cross-armed jokester shaking his head at the sight of Mike and George.

"Richie!" George smiled. "I feel like I'd know your sultry voice anywhere."

"And didn't you grow up handsome, you Denbrough squirt," Richie quipped, arms outstretched. George hugged him back, realising suddenly how much he'd missed the trash-talking of the group's potty mouth. The random thought that Richie could just talk Pennywise to death crossed his mind, almost making him laugh at the imagined showdown. Richie pulled back, and moved towards Mike.

"You nerdy old bastard, bringing us all back to this hell hole of a backwater to fight an all-powerful demon clown," he said, pulling the other man into a hug. "I hate you."

"Nice to see you too, Richie."

"No one's gonna believe me when I tell this story on air later," Richie said wistfully. "What a waste."

The Richie of the past was still there underneath his suave older exterior, echoed through every word he said. But the thick glasses were long gone, shed for contacts as soon as he was old enough to stop causing himself eye infections, and his hair was no longer the unruly mop it used to be. Instead, it was clearly and carefully styled to look messy, though every lock of hair was seemingly cut to exactly the planned length. Richie had become a successful talk-show and radio host based in Los Angeles, and it was obvious from his appearance and his understated but expensive suit that he was doing pretty well from it.

"Never believed a word you said anyway," came another voice, and the smirk accompanying it was clearly audible in the tone. The three of them looked to the doorway to see Eddie Kasprak, but he'd been minus the fanny pack and false medication for years, with the exception of his trusty inhaler which always sat as a comforting reassurance in his pocket. He looked dapper, in smart casual clothes and slicked back dark hair with only the slightest hints of grey above his ears. After all these years, he was no longer the shortest of the group and instead had grown to about the same height as George.

"I missed you guys," he said, his aloof demeanour dropping and his eyes suddenly a little watery. "Why did we fall out of contact for so long...?"

He crossed the room in a few steps, and embraced all of them at once, tightly. "I'd break my arm for the Losers any day."

"Don't get too keen," Richie said darkly, extracting himself. "You may live to regret that over-emotional promise."

"Promises are what got us here, after all," a wry voice remarked, belonging to a tanned and trim man leaning against the doorway. He was built in a way that clearly showed he worked out, with a nonchalant handsomeness and a playful gleam in his eyes. Though his outfit was somewhat casual with a blazer thrown on top to increase the formality, he exuded confidence and charm.

"No way... _Ben_?!" exclaimed Richie in disbelief, throwing his arms in the air. "You're more ripped than any of us, what is _going on_?" He grabbed the other man in a hug, to Ben's evident surprise as he staggered backwards a bit.

"There's nothing left of you to hug!" Richie chortled, fake-punching at Ben's stomach.

"Ah, a bit of eating better, getting fit, and growing out of my kid fat," Ben said, his cheeks a bit pink. "I don't miss the stomach, let me tell you."

He moved through the room and greeted Eddie and Mike, and then finally George.

"You look great, Ben," George said honestly. Ben smiled at him.

"Thanks, buddy," he said, embracing George. He, like the others, had never really grown out of seeing George as their adopted kid brother. "It's been too long."

They turned back to the others as the room suddenly went silent, looking to the doorway to see a beautiful red-haired woman standing there, apparently lost for words. There were a few long moments before anyone reacted, and then suddenly Eddie was almost tackling the woman.

"BEV!" he said joyfully. She laughed, hugging him back. Despite having been a similar height to them back when they were kids, Bev was now quite petite in comparison, easily a few inches shorted than Eddie and the others despite her heels. She was dressed in a floral patterned dress, likely of her own design as she'd long been a household name in fashion. According to Mike, who'd had to research all of them to make sure he contacted the right people, she had her own label now and was worth upwards of a hundred million dollars.

George glanced sideways at Ben, whose eyes were fixed on Bev and his cheeks even pinker than before. George smiled a little to himself. It seemed that crush on Beverly Marsh from all those years ago hadn't faded in the slightest. It actually made George a little sad, though, because he had gotten a vague feeling from Bev just before she left for Portland that she felt some of the same feelings for Ben. And yet here they were, so many years later, and the two of them had basically become like strangers again.

Bev finally reached the two of them, and stared at Ben, her light blue eyes wide.

"I know, I left half of me behind in New York," Ben joked sheepishly. She grinned at him and pulled him tight, her arms around him and her eyes closed.

"I missed you, Ben Hanscom," she said, quietly so that only Ben could hear, but George still managed to catch her words.

"You too, Bev," Ben said, returning the hug. There were heavy unspoken words between them, about the revelations they'd come across in the cavern while rescuing George that they'd never really been able to fully deal with. Ben remembered the day in the field before she left, her auburn hair glinting in the sunlight as they sat together. Then, when Bev had gotten up to leave, even though every bone in his body told him to run after her... he didn't. He let her leave, and it was one of his biggest regrets to this day. When Mike had called, it hadn't been the case that he didn't remember everything. Although he'd forgotten Derry, and their fight against Pennywise, he'd never forgotten the way he felt when Bev signed his yearbook, or the admiration he'd felt whenever he had been around her.

It would have been great if it had faded like the rest, but Bev never faded at all.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Ben pulled back from Bev, looking down at the ground, and she moved on to greet George.

"You grew up so handsome," she said, ruffling George's hair affectionately. "I knew you would though, you were the cutest kid."

She was even more disarming than she'd been when they were kids, back when she was the fearless older sister George had always wished he had. He hadn't been awake to see it, but he knew from the awestruck stories of Eddie and Richie that she'd been by far the bravest and the most heroic down in the sewers. She'd even survived a direct encounter with Pennywise, and not been scared. He wondered if she'd changed over the years, or if she was just as brave as she ever was.

Up close, George noticed her left cheek looked red and a bit swollen, and was suddenly concerned.

"Bev, what-"

She hushed him quickly, shaking her head with wide and suddenly fearful eyes, glancing back nervously at the others. George frowned in confusion, but went along with her desire to not bring attention to her cheek. He resolved to bring it up with her later, in private.

"Well, are we eating or did I fly over for Derry's best pasta for no reason?" Richie demanded, gesturing at the table. It was a round table with seven places laid, a glass of water set at the side of each entree plate.

"Wait, but Stan isn't here," George pointed out. There were only six of them so far.

"You snooze, you lose," Richie waved his hand dismissively, taking a seat and biting into a bread roll.

"He'll probably be along soon, George," Mike agreed. "We can get started, it's already twenty five past."

Something didn't sit right with George though, as the others took a seat. Ever since that phone call with Stan, he'd been a bit worried and he wasn't sure why.

"I'll just duck outside and see if he's there," he said. Bev looked at him in puzzlement, not understanding his worry. None of them would, they hadn't heard Stan's voice sounding like it belonged to a stranger over the phone. He really hoped Stan had kept his promise and returned to Derry after all.

As he exited the front door, away from the warm interior and into the darkness of the outside streets, his eyes took a minute to adjust to the lower lighting. There were people walking past, dressed in thick coats, heading to whatever arrangement they had on this even. The street lights had come on, a mix of warm orange and icy cold white lights sprinkled along the main street. George had always preferred the halogen lights, for their false conveyance of warmth no matter how cold it was outside.

He looked to his right, where a bus bench was located, and saw a figure with a beanie sitting there, evidently waiting for a bus that would never come.

"Hey mate, the buses stop at 6pm during the fall," he offered helpfully, and the figure turned to look at him. He blinked in surprise.

"Stan?"

The look on his old friend's face was guilty, just like his voice had been on the phone.

"What are you doing out here? Everyone's inside, waiting for you."

"Ah..." he said, looking away again across the road. "I'm sorry, George."

George went over to the bench and took a seat next to Stan, looking at him worriedly.

"What's the matter?"

"I just..." Stan started, still not looking at him. "It's a _lot_ , being back here. I wasn't sure how it would be, seeing everyone else as well."

George felt a little guilty himself, because for him everything so far had mostly been a brilliant reunion and he'd not really thought for a second that it would be anything but that. Denial was a powerful drug, it seemed. But for Stan it was clearly more than that.

"No, it's been great," George said truthfully. "Richie is up to his old antics, Eddie's so tall now, Bev's as amazing and beautiful as she ever was... Mike's still holding us together. Oh and you should see Ben!"

"I saw him on the cover of Time last year," Stan said, without cracking a smile. "For his architecture projects."

"Well, he's super fit in person," George insisted. He grabbed Stan's gloved hand, prompting a surprised look from the still curly-haired man.

"Come on, they'll want to see you."

He pulled Stan to his feet, and began towards the restaurant entry.

"Wait, George, I-"

George turned back to Stan, surprised at how pale his face was. It wasn't that cold outside, not yet. And the night had turned mostly cloudy, so the temperature would stay higher than normal.

"It'll be fine," George reassured him with a smile. "Trust me."

Stan didn't finish his sentence, but instead gave a small nod and allowed George to lead him inside. The group gave a big cheer when the two of them entered, Richie raising a glass already full with red wine. Stan smiled awkwardly, somehow still the same as ever, and greeted everyone with a reservation in his eyes that only George seemed able to detect. Probably, he was just nervous about seeing everyone again, George told himself, and squashed the worry about Stan from his mind as Mike filled his glass with merlot.

The entrees came without delay, a mix of antipasti and small servings of the famous pasta in different flavours that Jim's had become famous for. They all chatted and caught up and shared the stories of the different paths they'd taken since departing from Derry. Everyone clapped when they found out George was actually Dr Denbrough now, since completing his PhD a few years ago. Eddie revealed that he was working as a driver for celebrities in New York, most recently for one of the child stars of the Netflix show, _Stranger Things_. Bev had been in Tokyo at the time Mike called, launching a new line of fashion designing specifically for the Japanese market. Ben had just received an award for one of the buildings he'd designed, which he confessed that he'd dropped straight onto the floor after hearing Mike's voice at the other end of the phone call.

"So _that_ was what that noise was," Mike realised aloud. They all laughed.

They continued chatting as a trolley with the main courses was wheeled into the room by a waiter, not really paying much attention. George was literally laughing out loud at Richie's story of being trapped in an elevator with Julianne Moore, when suddenly Beverly gasped and Eddie shrieked, and his laugh died on his breath.

He looked behind him, to where the waiter with the trolley had gone, to see none other than Pennywise, dressed in a waiter outfit complete with bowtie but the same cracked clown make-up as always, beaming at them all. Being the closest, George tried to stand up to face the clown, but Pennywise slammed his gloved hand in a downwards motion and George was forced back into his seat, held there tight by a invisible and almost painful force.

"Hi Losers," he sang, waving. "It's been a while."

George looked next to him at Ben, who was also struggling to get out of his seat, and he realised that Pennywise was holding them all locked in their seats. This was a new development, compared to the last time they'd faced the clown.

"Oh yes," Pennywise said, teeth showing. "My powers are a bit stronger this time around... so don't try going anywhere, it would hurt my feelings."

"What do you want, clown?" Richie demanded, only the slightest tremor in his voice.

"So brave, Richie, _so brave_ ," Pennywise smirked. He walked closer to George, his hand outreached. George winced as he got closer, but he just felt the gloved hand scruff his hair, before patting his head.

"Duck," Pennywise said, moving on to to Stan, getting really close to his face and inspecting it carefully. Stan was looking straight ahead, not at Pennywise, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. Pennywise found what he was looking for - the scars his teeth had left on Stan's face all those years ago - and stroked them with delight. Stan shuddered, his eyes closing. George wished he could reach out to his friend, who was clearly the most affected by Pennywise's presence.

"Duck," Pennywise continued, drawing back from Stan and tapping him on the head. He got to Mike, and his eyes narrowed, his hand going around the man's neck.

"It's all your fault they're back," he hissed in Mike's ear, tightening his grip. "You should have left me be. You'll regret that."

He released Mike, who gasped for breath.

"Duck." He clouted Mike on the head, and everyone jumped in shock. Mike grimaced, but seemed otherwise mostly unfazed by Pennywise's hit.

"Duck, my dear Eddie," Pennywise said, reaching down and lifting the blue inhaler from his pocket. He tapped Eddie's head, shaking his own at the same time. "Still holding on to the myths your mother raised in you."

He dropped the inhaler on the table, and proceeded to Richie.

"I'm not scared of you, _clown_ ," Richie said through gritted teeth.

"Oh, but you made a _career_ out of lying, didn't you, boy," said Pennywise, running a gloved hand down Richie's face. "I see everything, Richie. I know you're still terrified of clowns. Of me."

Richie's face crumbled a little, and he dropped his eyes, silent.

"Duck," said Pennywise, patting Richie's head with a cackle.

When he got to Bev, whose blue eyes flashed with defiance, Pennywise stopped. He almost looked a little disconcerted, George thought, but then he recovered with a malicious smile.

"I'd tap you, but then, didn't your daddy already beat me to it?"

Bev's face paled, and the defiance in her eyes faded, replaced with... shame? George's heart panged, seeing the look on her face at the reminder of her father. He hated the clown for the pain he brought so easily to people.

"Duck," Pennywise said, not tapping her head but instead waving his hands in her general direction.

"I guess that makes me the goose," Ben said coldly, still pulling against the invisible ties, glaring at Pennywise.

"Correct you are," Pennywise said, moving so that he was standing behind Ben, a gloved hand on each shoulder. He knelt down, so that his ghastly face was next to Ben's, and planted a kiss on his cheek. Ben flinched and lurched away, but was still held in place. A red smear was left on Ben's cheek, to all of their disgust. Pennywise laughed, shaking Ben in his chair as he did so, clearly enjoying this situation. Then suddenly, as quickly as he started, the clown froze with a strange look on his face, stepped back from Ben, and waved his hand so that Ben along with his chair was thrown backwards across the room and into the wall.

"Ben!" Bev cried. Ben groaned, slumped against the wall, the chair broken next to him. Pennywise clapped loudly, directing their attention away from Ben and back to him, where he was now standing again next to the trolley.

"I came here tonight for a _reason_ , my dear old enemies," he said, wheeling the trolley out of the corner as he spoke. He began to deposit one plate in front of each of them, the content hidden by a large ornate metallic dome in each case. "Just as you all heeded Mike's desperate call and returned here."

George stared at the metal dome in front of him, somehow not really wanting to know what was underneath. He was pretty sure it wasn't his fettuccine arrabiata with meatballs.

"Don't get me wrong, I would rather _enjoy_ devouring each of you in the slowest, most painful way I can devise," Pennywise smiled in what the clown probably thought was a charming way, rows of teeth poking from his mouth. "But, my time here would undoubtedly go a lot smoother if the seven of you crawled back to the holes you came out of, even I have to acknowledge this."

Having deposited Stan's and Mike's meals, he moved on to Eddie, continuing his chatting with the air of a talkative host. George tried again to pull himself away from his chair but to no avail. Meanwhile, Ben was holding a hand to his head, his eyes squinted shut in pain.

"So I thought I'd give you one last chance to leave. _Leave this town_ , or die trying in vain to stop me. I think it's a great offer," he said, depositing a meal in front of Richie, then grabbing Richie's head in his hands. "Don't you agree, Richie?"

"Yes sir this is a _great_ idea," Pennywise nodded Richie's head back and forth comically, in a terrible rendition of his on-air presenter voice. "Or my name isn't Richie Trashmouth Tozier!"

He released Richie's head, slamming it forward into the metal cover in front of him, from which it bounced off with a loud clunk. Richie groaned in pain, swearing under his breath at the clown.

"Fuck you, clown," Bev said darkly when he approached her, having apparently recovered from his previous attack on her past. "I'm not leaving until your guts are smeared all over the walls of that cavern you like so much."

"Lovely," Pennywise said, dropping her meal in front of her. "Wouldn't expect anything less from you, Bevvie dear."

She pulled against the chair angrily, almost hissing at him as he passed close behind her, the trolley now only containing one meal.

"Well, maybe you don't need another meal, huh, Fat Boy?" he addressed Ben, deliberately trying to provoke him. "How many meals have you skipped over the years to achieve this facade you've got going?"

"Shut up," Ben growled at him. He didn't move as a metal dome was placed in front of him on the floor. Evidently the clown's powers were still holding him in place as well.

"Well, I take it you're all staying?" Pennywise prompted, returning to his spot just behind George. The silence and glares he was greeted with affirmed what the clown already knew. It amused him that despite their fear, they would still choose to stay. But Pennywise always knew it would be that way.

"Then, please," he said dramatically, bowing in a greatly overstated way. "Enjoy this main course glimpse into your bright futures."

Pennywise, with a wave of his hand, removed the covers from all their meals at once, to reveal the horrible surprise he'd prepared for them. George gagged at the sight of his own severed head, eyes closed and face bloated, a small apple stuck in the mouth for decorative effect. Maggots crawled in and out of every orifice, pooling in small heaps on the bed of lettuce beneath the rotting head. He looked around the table to see the same scene repeated in front of each of his friends, to varying reactions. Richie looked genuinely horrified, while Bev was just staring numbly at the head in front of her. Eddie had his eyes scrunched shut, determined not to look at the horror in front of him.

"And with that, my dear Losers, I will leave you," Pennywise declared with satisfaction, a giggle creeping into his voice. "Rest assured that your fate, should you unwisely choose to stay, will be long, drawn-out and extra painful. _I'll make sure of it._ "

With a loud bang and a theatrical puff of smoke, they were left only with the fading sounds of his cackling, as the invisible binds that held them fell away. The severed heads disappeared too, replaced by their real food orders as if they'd never been there in the first place. And yet, somehow, George's appetite had disappeared along with Pennywise's dark magic. A long silence followed, as they all tried to process what had just happened. Ben slowly got to his feet, lifting the pieces of the broken chair to assess the damage and concluding that it was definitely beyond repair.

"Well," Mike said finally, mouth drawn in a tight line. "Welcome back to Derry."

Against his will, and despite the situation, George suddenly found Mike's apologetic and slightly sarcastic phrase along with the clown's appearance at their reunion dinner completely absurd, and he burst out laughing, unable to stop. The others stared at him in amazement, stunned by his laughter. But it turned out his almost manic laughter was contagious, and before long the whole room was laughing, a kind of desperate crazy laughter at something that was both hilarious and traumatising.

"Gosh, are we _screwed_!" exclaimed Eddie.

"Absolutely," Richie agreed, high-fiving him. "Look forward to going down with you, brother."

Eventually their laughter died down, and the spontaneous hilarity of the situation wore off, leaving somewhat of a cold reality in its wake. The clown had made it clear, that this was their last chance to back down. They would either win somehow, despite the fact that they really didn't have a plan yet, or they would likely die horrible deaths in the worst way their enemy could imagine. It wasn't a great set of odds in their favour. But what they did realise pretty quickly was that all of their appetites had been effectively quenched thanks to Pennywise. So without further ado, they gathered their things and sorted out the bill, including the cost of the "drunkenly broken" chair, before heading outside into the biting evening air. They were about to hail some taxis when Mike remembered, and stopped them.

"Wait, everyone," he said with urgency in his voice. "I have something I need you to see first."

George hung back a little, warily, as Mike led the others towards the chained up bike. He watched as, just like he had earlier, Mike wheeled the bicycle into the washed-out light of the overhead street lamp, and looked hopefully to the others. But to his evident dismay, no one said anything. There was no shout of familiarity, no claim of recognition. Instead, just a long drawn out silence, which made Mike's face fall in disappointment.

"It's okay, I knew I-" he began, then stopped mid-sentence, his face changing. "Bev... why are you crying?"

Stunned, the rest of the group followed his gaze to see tears rolling down Bev's face, her eyes fixed on the silver bicycle with a mix of sadness and confusion on her face.

"I... I don't know," she choked out, hastily smearing the tears from her face. "I don't know..."

"Do you recognise this bike?" Mike asked sharply, suddenly returning to detective mode. "Did it belong to one of us?"

"Mike, _I don't know_ ," she said again, a couple more tears leaking out. She paused, breathed out and closed her eyes for a few seconds, before opening them again to look directly at Mike. "All I know is that when I saw it... I felt really strong emotions. Sadness mostly... some regret... I'm not sure. Yes, some familiarity. This bike was a part of our past, Mike. I'm sure of it. I don't... I don't know why I can't remember _how_."

It didn't matter that the details from Bev were foggy, George could see that fact written all over Mike's suddenly hopeful and vindicated expression. Suddenly, here was a clue to a detail in their lost past, and maybe a step in the right direction towards defeating Pennywise. He could see the wheels turning in his friend's mind, see links being made that Mike wasn't yet voicing aloud.

"Okay," Mike said at last. "Okay. It's late. Let's regroup tomorrow. I truly believe the key to defeating Pennywise is to figure out what he is hiding from us, and what parts of the past we still don't remember yet. Try to get a good night's sleep. I'll meet you at the hotel at 10am, and we can decide where to go from there. But we stick together, do you hear me? Don't ever be alone, because _he_ can sense that. Don't let your guard down. He's _everywhere_."

Everyone nodded sombrely.

"Mike, what about you?" Ben asked suddenly, concerned. "Shouldn't you come to the hotel with us?"

"No, I'll be fine," Mike said, shaking his head. "If Pennywise decides to pay me a visit, I've got a few tricks up my sleeve to make him regret that."

No one seemed particularly convinced by his confident answer, despite his own certainty, but he waved their concerns away and flagged a couple of taxis to leave the rank and come pick them up.

"Tomorrow morning, 10am," Mike repeated to them, through the rolled down windows of the two cars.

" _Don't be late_."


	7. Chapter 7

_Note: Hello again! Here is the next chapter, a little shorter this time. Originally I planned to go a bit further in time during this chapter, but I think it is best deferred to the next one. Means you get an update sooner! This is quite a dark chapter, dark themes... so please note that. I stand by George's stance in this chapter, and if anyone out there ever feels the darkness is too heavy, please talk to someone. There's no such thing as a way out, only a way forward. I really believe that. Thank you everyone for the reviews from last chapter, and for following this story, I will do my best to keep updating as soon as I can!_

* * *

 _It always came back to this place, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it._

 _Just like every time before, he found himself separated from his friends, alone and lost in the sewers with only the rancid smell and the threat of impending doom to keep him company. He was weighed down by the knowledge that she was coming for him, that It was coming for him, and there was nothing he could do about it. He hated feeling so powerless, not like his friends who always seem to rise up and fight back in the face of danger. He just tried to run away, and in doing so ran headfirst into the beckoning embrace of the dark evil that lived in Derry's haunted depths._

 _He heard her tortured call, as always, spun his flashlight around trying to stun her or even just spot her before she found him, but there was only the empty dripping sewer. He called for his friends, a plaintive cry for help that echoed off the walls around him. Why did they have to come down here in the first place? What was he trying to prove by chasing the ghost of his brother down here?_

 _Whose brother?_

 _He was grabbed from behind, flung against the wall before he could process the strange thought any further, then he felt her clawed fingernails grip his shirt and throw him downwards, until he was lying on his back in a pool of cold water, feeling it seep into his clothing as he scrunched his eyes tight against the reality that he had been caught, that this sewer would be his demise. He dared a peek through his eyes at her, saw her gaunt mangled face leering down at him as she pinned him to the floor. Saw the mouth open, teeth bared in endless rows as they lowered towards his face._

 _He screamed, as loud as he could, desperate for anyone to hear him and save him from this creature. His fear only worked against him in this case, making the monster behind the mask even more pleased. He felt the tears leaking down his face, heard his own wailing in his ears, and knew this was it, this was the end for him. His vision was blurring from the tears of terror and panic, but as he looked around wildly for an escape, he suddenly spotted a figure standing to the side, in the shadows of the cistern. A tall, lanky figure, whose face he couldn't quite make out properly but somehow seemed familiar. The figure saw him watching, stepped forward shakily, and suddenly the light illuminated a dirt-streaked face with dark green eyes and ratty brown hair. A face that, in his heart, he knew, even though it had changed. The figure held out a hand towards him, trembling, as the woman from the painting leaned further towards him, teeth dripping with saliva onto his face._

 _"BILL!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, with all the energy he had, but the figure just dropped to his knees, defeated, curling up in a ball and rocking. Was this person named Bill? Why wouldn't he help him? If he would only stop the creature, then they could both escape from this wretched place..._

 _But then his view of the other was blocked by the woman descending on him, her mouth full of teeth opening wide to the size of his face, the smell of rotting flesh and blood filling his nostrils. He screamed again as the razor-sharp teeth pierced his skin, tracing a circle of blinding pain around his face as she tore into his flesh. He felt the hot blood seeping from the wounds, couldn't see anything but the darkness of her cavernous mouth. He felt himself beginning to pass out, cried out once more for help that would never come._

 _She pressed down further, her teeth ripping further into his face which felt like it was on fire from the pain. Yes, this was what happened when you tried to fight It. This was the end result, every time. He should have known better. Why hadn't he learnt by now?_

 _The darkness was warm and encompassing and safe, and he welcomed it, knowing this was his fate all along._

* * *

George woke with a start, his heart racing, unsure why he has suddenly been stirred from what had been a relatively deep sleep. He had been dreaming about his old house here in Derry, and strangely enough, of a figurine of a turtle that he had built out of green blocks as a child. He didn't know why, but somehow that had seemed important.

Now that he was awake, something felt very _wrong_. He couldn't shake the feeling that something was off, and he wondered if he would look around his room to find the clown sitting across from him. But, despite his fears, there was nothing else in his small hotel room. It was dark and still. And yet the feeling of something being wrong could not be shaken.

He thought back to their arrival back at Derry Inn, at the brief conversations that took place before they all went their separate ways. How Bev had hurriedly whispered under her breath to him, promising she would explain tomorrow but desperate for the others not to notice what he had. How the joking offhand tone in Richie's voice didn't quite match the faint despair in his eyes. How Eddie's lighthearted cheer from earlier had been quashed, leaving behind a quiet and solemn demeanour. And while everyone else seemed blind to it, George did not miss the regretful, forlorn look that crossed Ben's face as he watched Bev ascend the stairs, before turning down the hall to his own room. But the one who disturbed him most of all was his closest friend of the old Losers gang, for the look in Stan's eyes as he said goodnight seemed so distant and far away, like he wasn't even there at all. And when George had called after him, checking if he was okay, Stan had just very calmly stated that he was fine, before turning back and heading to his room.

Yes, something had been up with Stan. Maybe that was why he had woken up now, realising they had an unfinished conversation from outside of Jim's, where Stan had been trying to tell him something that he didn't want to hear, too desperate to get back to the delusion of a reunion dinner with friends in the warmth of an old haunt. What a joke that had turned out to be, he should have known Pennywise would show up. George pushed back the covers, pulled on a shirt and resolved to go find out from Stan what really was on his mind... something that seemed like it had been since their first phone call conversation.

He slipped quietly from his room, his socked feet making no sound on the carpeted hallway floor as he made his way to the room belonging to Stan. They'd exchanged all their room numbers before separating, to ensure they could find each other if needed. Mobile phones were great and all, but sometimes physically finding someone was necessary. Once outside the door, he leaned his ear against it, trying to hear any noises inside. It was completely silent, and he wondered if it was really a good idea after all to wake his friend for no reason. But he was here, and there was seemingly something upsetting Stan that they needed to discuss, so he decided to knock, tapping quietly on the wooden frame.

There was no response.

"Stan?" George said in a low voice, trying to be as quiet as possible so he wouldn't wake anyone else in the near vicinity. Still, nothing. He knocked a little louder. Loud enough that even someone sleeping in the room should be stirred from their sleep. And yet, there was still no movement heard on the other side of the door. His heart rate rising a little in concern for his friend, George tried the door handle. It was locked, of course, as they'd all been sure to be careful. Not that a locked door would really stop Pennywise though. He seemed to be everywhere at once.

What if Pennywise got Stan? The thought was too horrible. George tried again the handle in a slight panic, worried his friend might currently be at the mercy of the demon clown. To his surprise, this time it gave way, and the door swung silently open. He quickly scanned the room, seeing a bed that had been slept in but now empty. The window was shut, so there was nothing to worry about there. There was no one in the room, just Stan's belongings, which only left the small attached bathroom to check. A feeling of dread crept up in his chest as he walked towards the bathroom, where the door was shut but slightly ajar. The inside was faintly illuminated by the light coming in from a window in the bathroom. Somewhere outside, the moon was pretty full to be providing that much light.

His hand shaking a little, George pushed open the door, not sure what he would find on the other side.

"Stan!"

He rushed to the side of his friend, who was sitting on the tiled floor in the near darkness with his back against the wall. In Stan's left hand was a glint of metal, and his right wrist was covered in blood. Stan looked at George with hazy unfocused eyes, as if he were between the dreaming and waking world.

"George...?" he said uncertainly. In a panic, George ripped the small razor blade out of Stan's hand and threw it across the floor, where it clinked into a corner near the bath tub. He grabbed the hanging white hand towel from next to the sink and held it against Stan's wrist, trying both to wipe up the blood and assess how bad the cut was.

"What were you _thinking_?" George demanded angrily, harsher than he intended, but so furious at Stan for what he had attempted. There was no answer from Stan, who just averted his eyes with cheeks tinted pink.

George pulled back the towel, examining the cut. Fortunately, although there was a fair amount of blood, the cut itself didn't seem too deep and the wound was already beginning to seal itself slightly. It was a jagged zig zag cut, clearly made with a hesitant gesture. Grimacing, George got to his feet and rinsed the towel under warm water, really not liking the way the blood flowed in watered down trails into the sink. Once the towel had been mostly rinsed, though it remained in patches an off-pink colour, he turned back to Stan and gingerly dabbed at the cut to clean it properly. As he did so, it occurred to him that the scene could have been a lot worse had he not arrived when he did.

He sighed.

" _Stan_ ," he said again, slightly exasperated, but much softer this time. He started to say something else, then hesitated, not wanting to say the wrong thing. He realised suddenly that this had been why Stan had been so strange and distracted, _this_ was why he'd been so odd outside the restaurant, with this terrible thing weighing on his mind... but he couldn't claim to fully understand why his friend had ended up in a bathroom with a razor. He wrapped the towel around Stan's wrist as a makeshift bandage, racking his brain for the right words.

Before he could say anything, Stan finally looked at him.

"I'm... I'm sorry, George," he said, his voice cracking and the words choking in his throat. His eyes welled up and he used his good hand to wipe at his face, shoulders shaking. George didn't know what else to do but put his arms around his friend, careful to avoid the injured wrist. Stan sobbed into his pyjama shirt, soaking it with tears. George had never seen Stan like this before, but he imagined it wasn't so different to when the others had saved him from a near-death at the hands of Pennywise all those years ago. George obviously hadn't been there, but he'd heard from Eddie months later that Stan had been almost inconsolable, hysterically shouting about how they had abandoned him and left him to die.

"It's okay, Stan," he said gently, holding his friend tight. "You're okay."

"I'm _not_." Stan pulled back suddenly, his sobbing halting, again wiping at his face with his injured wrist limp at his side. "I'm really not."

"What do you mean?"

"George, I tried to tell you before..." Stan bit his lip, looking ashamed, glancing down at his wrist. "That night when Mike called, when _you_ called... I was halfway to _here_."

He gestured around him helplessly.

"You were going to...?" George trailed off, too scared to finish the sentence. He couldn't believe that Stan, the most grown-up and mature of the Losers, would really consider leaving them in such a way. Being the youngest, George had always looked up to every one of the Losers, and they in turn had looked out for him, each in their own way. Stan had been one of his closest friends, even going into college. Their friendship had, at least for a while, survived the curse of leaving Derry. It was true that George's time trapped in Pennywise's lair had changed him, made him more suspicious of strangers for sure, but also more observant in general. He often wondered if his ability to observe the world around him and notice things that most people didn't was what had led him into the field of physics and astronomy. And he would be the first to acknowledge that Stan had always been a little on the edge of the group, a little distant, the last to believe that there really was a clown and the first to want out of the situation at every opportunity. But _this_? George hadn't seen this coming at all.

"I was always the scared one, I know that," Stan admitted quietly. "Everyone made fun of Eddie, for being small and weak and reliant on his pretend medicine, but when it came down to it... I was the most scared of all of us."

"You'd be stupid not to be scared," George said. "Pennywise is more powerful than ever and we still don't really know what we're dealing with. He's not a clown. He's not even remotely human... I'm terrified too, you know that right?"

"You don't seem it," Stan said, some disbelief in his voice. "Not the way I am..."

"I'm scared of Pennywise, I've always been scared of him," George said truthfully, looking Stan directly in the eyes. "I'm scared of what will happen if we don't figure out a way to get an advantage over him, of the ways he plans to keep his promise to make us suffer. I'm scared that, no matter how hard I try, I'm only destined to be a casualty in this stupid game and I'll never be able to help you guys, just like last time. I'm scared of anything happening to any of us, to _you_... and I'm scared of what he's hiding from us, because I'm pretty sure hidden in those memories is the key to defeating him. But it might also be something we don't want to remember. Something tells me that... _whatever it is_... it's painful."

Stan's brow furrowed in confusion at the last part, to George's surprise. He didn't expect that kind of reaction to his confessions of fear, but clearly what he had said had triggered something in Stan's mind. His friend took a deep breath, still shaking a little.

"Before I woke up..." he began, looking fearful. "I had the dream again, about when Pennywise got me. As vivid and terrifying as ever, maybe worse than before... the pain seemed so _real_... but now I think I remember that there was someone else there."

"Someone else?" George repeated, now puzzled. "One of the others?"

"No, not one of us..." Stan shook his head unsurely. "It's so foggy now, I can't really remember. On the one hand I felt like I recognised the person, and on the other... a complete stranger. The same way that I couldn't tell if they were going to help me, or help Pennywise..."

"Hmm," George said, thinking back to his dream on the plane from Sydney. Hadn't there been someone on the boat with him? But then, he had dismissed the figure as Pennywise, which seemed sensible at the time. Especially when the eyes flashed silver, just like the clown's. Maybe there was more to this than just their sleeping minds running overtime.

"I woke up and I was _so_ scared and I just felt like there was no way out," Stan admitted, his eyes on the razor across the floor from them. "I brought it with me... I know that was stupid. It sat in the bottom of my toiletries bag taunting me, and I had this feeling that this was my way out, you know? This was the way it was _meant_ to go."

"No," George interrupted firmly, his hand on Stan's left forearm. "Not as long as I'm around, okay? If you _ever_ even think vaguely of something like this again, you call me? Not just here in Derry, but anytime. Anywhere. You are meant to be here, in this world, _alive_ , got it? This is not the way out. Please... please don't ever do this again..."

He trailed off, his emotions getting the better of him and his eyes welling up a little.

"Thank you," Stan said softly, moving his left hand to grip George's hand tightly. "Thank you for stopping me. The darkness just felt so heavy... but it's not like that with you here."

They sat there in silence for a while, both thinking their own thoughts and both wondering about the mysterious figure they had seen. George personally wondered if it was another trick of Pennywise, that maybe they were playing right into his hands by picking up on the shadowy figure lurking in their dreams. But something else told him it wasn't quite what it seemed, and that maybe this was a genuine clue to the missing pieces of their memories. Something to run by Mike tomorrow, in any case. Their friend would certainly be keen to play detective on this development, and maybe it would fit in to other things he'd uncovered along the way. Maybe it was even connected to the rusty bicycle.

"Hey..." Stan's shaky voice broke into his thoughts.

"Yeah?"

"You... you can't tell anyone about this..." Stan looked at him with pleading eyes. "I don't want the others to know."

George bit his lip, really not liking what his friend was asking of him. He wasn't foolish enough to believe that Stan was completely out of the danger zone, even if he seemed now like he wouldn't try what he had tried. They were going to have some tough times ahead, Pennywise would make sure of it, and there was no guarantee that Stan wouldn't end up feeling like there was no way out again. If the others knew, then they could help keep an eye on him and help keep Stan safe.

"Stan, they should know..."

"No, please George... it's the last thing I need, for them all to worry about me and treat me like... like the weak idiot I am... _please_..."

"What about your wrist? They'll notice that," George pointed out. The makeshift towel bandage needed to be replaced with a real bandage, even if Stan didn't need stitches. And George wasn't entirely convinced that that was the case, even if the bleeding had slowed a lot.

"I'll wear long sleeves, they won't see," Stan said quickly. "Look, just for now, keep it between us?"

Against his better judgement, George finally nodded.

"Fine... but only on the condition that if you even feel in the _slightest_ the way that you did tonight, you come find me. No matter what time or where we are, okay? Promise?"

Stan nodded hurriedly, the relief showing on his face.

"I have a small first aid kit in my suitcase," he said, gesturing to his room. "I think there are a couple of bandages in that..."

"Okay, I'll grab it," George said, getting to his feet. He eyed the razor briefly before he left the bathroom, but decided it would be fine for the brief interval that he was in the room. He resolved to pocket it before going back to his own room, to at least remove one possible avenue of future self-harm. Back in Stan's room, he spotted the suitcase, and rummaged around in it before finding a small red rimmed package down the side of the case, buried amongst Stan's clothes. He retrieved it, and headed back to help Stan patch his wrist up. But as he crossed the room to re-enter the bathroom, something caught his eye out of Stan's second-floor window.

Something red.

Something floating.

A gift from Pennywise, who it seemed was always watching. And scrawled in messy black writing (or was it dried blood?) was a message, directed at George. He swallowed the lump in his throat, glancing back to the bathroom and hoping to whatever god was out there that it would be gone by the time Stan emerged from the bathroom.

 _HE'LL FLOAT TOO._

They needed a plan of action against the clown, and they needed it _fast_. Because currently it felt like Pennywise held all the cards and they were just playing into his hand, like they had all along.

* * *

In the wreckage of the old carriage, amidst the time-worn painted flames, the boy once known as Bill Denbrough was sobbing into his arms. What had been a torture for the last many years had suddenly developed into something far more painful. He'd watched his friends die, again and again, for years... but what he didn't realise was that when he had been suspended, the shadows that flitted across his eyes were only the hollowed-out ghosts of his friends and family. As real as it may have seemed to him originally, their cries for help and screams of pain had been missing _something_. Even though Pennywise had used his powers and tried his best to replicate the Losers, the clown did not and could not truly understand humans, so his constructed nightmares always seemed just a little washed out. It had been part of the reason Bill had figured out he was trapped in a false reality.

Now that Pennywise had connected him to the mindscapes of the Losers, Bill was guest-starring in the nightmares of his actual friends, even if he didn't know it. And so the nightmares had taken on a new darkness, a new level of pain, thanks to the complexity of _real_ human fear. To the point where Bill had, during the nightmare he'd just witnessed of Stan, suddenly wanted to reach out and help his friend, to save him from the terrifying woman from the painting. The worst torture of all, in Bill's mind, was that Pennywise had tricked him once again into believing his friends were still alive, that he was actually seeing them being attacked in his nightmares, when it was all just a falsity that he'd stumbled upon a long time ago. And the greatest irony of all, to the clown's amusement, was that he was utterly wrong, and that these were his _friends'_ nightmares, not his own.

Watching the boy suffer, while snacking on the arm of one of the little girls from the tea party, Pennywise chuckled to himself.


	8. Chapter 8

_Note: Sorry for the delay in this chapter! December turned out to be a lot crazier than I expected... it's that time of year I guess. Had a bit of time the last few days to finally work on getting the next chapter ready. Big thanks as always to everyone who left a review, I really appreciate it - your support keeps me writing :) really neat to get a review in Spanish this time too :D As always, I apologise for any discontinuities with the universe as presented by the book (which I still have not finished!), you'll see why later in this chapter - it's my take on things based on what I do know :) I hope you like this next installment, and wish you all a great holiday season! But don't look too close down those gurgling drains if you know what's good for you... ;)_

* * *

 _I don't want to be afraid  
_ _The deeper that I go  
_ _It takes my breath away  
_ _Soft hearts, electric souls  
_ _Heart to heart and eyes to eyes  
_ _Is this taboo?  
_ \- House of Memories, Panic! At The Disco

* * *

The next morning, George woke up and found a simple text message waiting from Mike, presumably mirrored across all of their phones.

 _Kenduskeag Conference Room - be there ASAP_.

He was still a bit groggy from the events of last night, and somewhat anxious when it came to the thought of Stan. Not wanting to delay, he pulled himself out of bed, showered and got dressed, then headed downstairs. The Derry Inn included breakfast as part of the accommodation, so he had a quick bowl of cereal to keep him going and then wandered the hallways until he found the mahogany doors marked with a small golden plaque that said: _KENDUSKEAG_. Named after the river that crept its way through Derry, and through their old haunt, the Barrens.

A bit apprehensively, George pushed the door open, and stared in shock at the contents of the room.

It was decorated with newspaper clippings, scraps of paper, maps, scrawled notes on lined paper, old faded photographs and more, stuck up around the room in what seemed like a madman's timeline. Bits of red string connected some of the photos and notes, while others just seemed haphazardly scattered. It reminded George a little of the collection Ben had once had in his room, shown to him not long after they rescued him from the sewers to see if anything rang a bell, but by then the memories had already been fading and it was soon after that that Ben had removed everything and stored it in an archive box, no longer remembering why he'd been so obsessed with the dark history of Derry in the first place. It seemed that some of the remnants of that archive box had ended up in Mike's possession.

This room, however, was not as organised and systematic as Ben's had been. It could have equally been the evidence room of a fanatic detective or an insight into the mind of a serial killer, George wasn't quite sure which. And standing in the middle of it all, with a pensive expression on his tired face, was Mike Hanlon. He turned at the sound of the door opening.

"Ah, George," Mike greeted him. George looked around the room, and to his relief saw Stan sitting in one of the maroon armchairs, clad in a warm-looking turtle-neck sweater. His wrist was completely hidden from view, as expected, but he looked overall a lot better than he had last night, if a little pale. Ben was perched on the seat of the bay window, a bemused expression on his face. There was no sign yet of Beverly, Eddie or Richie. George glanced at his watch and saw it was still only quarter to ten.

"What is... _this_?" George asked, waving his hand at the whirlwind of paper surrounding them. "I mean, I have an idea, but there's a lot here."

"Yeah," Mike admitted sheepishly. "I brought everything I had, got here around 7am and started setting it up. Figured it would make more sense to have it here so you guys could see it too. I've reserved this conference room for as long as needed, in any case."

 _As long as needed_... that rang a bit ominously in the back of George's mind.

"Okay," George nodded, pushing the thought down. "So what have we got?"

"Well, I've been thinking a lot about the memories we're still missing," Mike said. "Most of this stuff here, I can remember. Like Betty Ripsom going missing, and Patrick Hockstetter, and Eddie Corcoran. Ben and I both recall how we traced the recurrence of events to every 27 years or so, like the Black Spot incident or the Ironworks explosion. But some things don't make sense, and maybe those are the key to understanding what we don't remember."

"Yeah, like how we first knew _you_ ," Ben said, pointing at George. "All of us were in the same grade at school, but you were five years below us. I remember us all hanging out... especially after we rescued you... but I don't remember when we met, or how we met."

"Same here," agreed Stan. George's brow furrowed, as he searched his own memories. Like the others, he had to conclude that indeed, how he came to know them so well was completely foggy.

"Maybe you guys saved me from the Bowers gang at some point?" George wondered aloud. But whatever the truth was, he couldn't really grasp at it. It seemed that somehow Pennywise had maintained a hold on some of their memories, even now.

"I think it's important," Mike affirmed with certainty. "Whatever we're missing is important enough that Pennywise doesn't want us to remember, which means we should do all we can to figure it out."

They all looked up as the door opened, to see Eddie and Beverly enter. Eddie looked a little bit worse for wear, with faint bags under his eyes that made him seem older. Bev meanwhile looked fairly cheerful, her eyes bright with curiosity at the sight of Mike's decorations.

"Wow Mike," she said, a little awed. "You've been busy."

"Busy is an understatement," remarked Ben, shaking his head. "You make my past room look positively sparse, Mike."

Mike shrugged it off. "We need all the information we can get to go up against Pennywise, and if we can figure out what he is hiding from us buried in all this, then all the better."

"You really think it's something to do with me?" George asked uncertainly, walking closer to the strange paper collection with no small degree of apprehension. He didn't like the way Betty Ripsom's eyes stared at him out of the old yellowed paper.

"I'm not sure," Mike admitted. "But it seems like a good place to start. Maybe we knew you for another reason, something to do with Pennywise. In that case, maybe it is also connected to the bicycle and to what you were saying when you encountered Pennywise near Jackson. That perhaps you weren't meant to be here."

" _George_!" exclaimed Bev, apparently rather horrified that he would think that.

"I'm not being emotional about it, Bev," George assured her. "It's just what Pennywise implied when I saw him. There's something in that, Mike's right."

There was a short silence while they all contemplated the situation. Naturally, Richie chose that exact moment to burst in.

"Hello, Losers!" he shouted in an exuberant voice. "What's going on in..."

He trailed off as he noticed Mike's masterpiece decorating the walls, and let out a low whistle.

"Well, shit," he finished. He walked over to stand next to George at the poster of Betty Ripsom, cocking his head to the side as he inspected it. "Man, I remember the day we went in that cursed house and saw the ghost of her... or Pennywise's illusion, whatever it was."

"You do?" Eddie asked, speaking for the first time. He looked confused. "You saw her when I got separated from you?"

"Yeah, me and..." The rest of the sentence, for some reason, did not come, and instead a puzzled expression fell across Richie's face.

"That!" exclaimed Mike suddenly, pointing at Richie. "Exactly that!"

"Exactly what, Mike?" Ben didn't sound like he followed Mike's enlightenment. He hopped off the bay window seat and approached the group, standing next to Stan's chair.

"Not the missing poster, Ben," Mike said dismissively. "Richie has a gap in his memory of that day, too. He and Eddie were with someone else in the house, and we've forgotten _who_. This is part of it."

"Another missing kid?" Eddie wondered aloud, scratching his head.

"Or maybe..." Bev's voice came, quietly and a bit pained. "Maybe one of... us?"

"Us?" Richie repeated, dumbfounded.

"Not us here... maybe someone who was with us back then? But why have we forgotten who they were?" Bev looked to Ben, who only shrugged helplessly. But Mike, meanwhile, nodded fervently.

"Yes, that's a good point, Bev!" he said. "That could be it. Someone else might have been with us back then, so we just have to figure out who. It's gotta be buried somewhere in here in Derry."

George didn't voice what he was thinking, because he wasn't really sure what to make of it himself. But if Bev was right, and there was someone else who'd been with them back then, then what was their connection to him? Why did he feel such an odd feeling when he saw that rusty old bike, and why was Pennywise hiding whoever it was from their memories?

"We should investigate this lead further," Mike continued, a little fervent in his enthusiasm. "I was thinking about where we should look this morning while I waited for you all."

He wheeled a small whiteboard over to in front of them, and flipped it to reveal a rather abrupt map of Derry. Mike had circled three main locations that he obviously thought were important to investigate: the Barrens, the public library and the house on Neibolt Street.

"Bags not that damned house," said Richie, with a dramatic shudder. "Not again."

"Realistically, I think it's our best shot," said Bev levelly. "I'll go."

George glanced over at Ben, not surprised to see his eyes trained on Bev. But there was a look of apprehension on his face at the mention of the house.

"Great," Mike agreed. "Someone else should go with you, though - anyone?"

There was an awkward silence, which Bev filled with a laugh.

"Well, this is familiar," she joked. "You're all still a bunch of scaredy cats, I see!"

"I'll go," George offered in a lighthearted tone. "I don't even know the house, so how could I be scared of it?"

"Oh, pretty easily," Eddie said nervously, breathing heavily and his hand around something in his pocket. He shook his head, looking thoroughly disturbed at the thought of the Neibolt house.

"Okay, Bev and George will go to Neibolt. Ben and Stan, can you check out the library? And Richie and Eddie, you guys scout out the Barrens. I'll stay here, and try to piece together this all a bit clearer and see if I can make any links."

They all solemnly agreed on Mike's plan, and got ready to go their separate ways. George wasn't really sure about his bold statement about the Neibolt house, in the end. It had always been _that creepy house_ , something he would cycle past faster if he happened to be nearby, and certainly that area of town was one that his parents had always been keen for him to avoid even as he got older. But he'd never been inside like the others had, at least not while conscious, and so didn't know what it was like to face off against the clown on its own territory.

Who knew, maybe they would get lucky and Pennywise wouldn't be home when they stopped by.

* * *

"You're a chicken, you know?" Stan's voice was deliberately provocative.

"What?" Ben asked, a bit taken aback by his friend's words as his eyes scanned across the history section.

"Did you ever deal with that stuff with Bev? Down in the sewers, you kissed her, and you're the one who sent the postcard, aren't you?"

"You know about the postcard?" Ben was a bit unnerved, he knew she'd been confused about the sender but he hadn't thought she had discussed it with anyone. Stan didn't reply at first, but then nodded.

"Bev asked me about it, a couple days after she got it. She wasn't sure who had left it in her bag and she knew it had to be one of us. She suspected someone, I can't remember who now, and she wanted to know my thoughts. I barely knew her then, I don't know why she asked me. But when I saw the handwriting, I recognised it from your room. I knew it was yours. Honestly, I was surprised she didn't make the connection herself."

"You _told_ her?"

Stan laughed at the panic in his voice.

"Of course not. I said I had no idea."

"Oh," Ben said, pulling a book from the shelf. He recognised the title, and sure enough, when he opened the inside cover he saw his name written neatly on the check-out slip, dating back to the summer of 1989.

"But she knew, right?" Stan prompted. "In the sewer, you kissed her. I saw the look you guys shared. What happened?"

"We... never spoke about it..." Ben said, idly flipping through the pages. He was pretty sure this was the same book that Pennywise had tortured him with, showing him the close-up of the head of the boy from the Ironworks explosion before sending the headless body after him in the library basement.

"Never?"

"No. We just kind of pretended it never happened. I always had a feeling her heart was somewhere else anyway."

Even though he was saying the words nonchalantly, Ben still felt the pain in his chest as he said them. It had been all these years, and he'd been with many women in that time (never for long, though), and yet the moment Beverly Marsh walked through that door at Jim's, he was as head over heels in love with her as he'd been back in school.

"Who?"

"Who what?"

"Who do you think she liked back then?" Stan asked, sounding curious, reshelving a book he'd removed and flicked through. "One of us? Someone else?"

Ben paused, not really sure. On the one hand he felt like back then, he'd known for sure who she liked (and it _wasn't_ him), and he had felt the pangs of watching whoever it was return her affections. But he couldn't for the life of him remember who that person had been. So maybe it had just always been that it wasn't him.

"I dunno, maybe Richie or something," he muttered. "I can't remember."

Stan looked at him through narrowed eyes, trying to discern whether Ben refused to disclose the truth or whether he truly didn't remember. It seemed odd, but then again maybe Ben had never known who was competing with him for Bev's affections. Or maybe this was connected to Mike's conspiracy theory?

"This page," Ben said suddenly, showing the open book to Stan. "This is the one he showed me."

"Ugh," Stan said, blanching upon realisation that he was looked at the severed head of a small child lodged in a tree.

"Yeah," Ben said thoughtfully. "Then there was a trail of smoking Easter eggs, leading into the basement."

"And you _followed_?" Stan said in disbelief. "You're crazier than Mike."

"Curiosity, you know. And back then I hadn't encountered Pennywise before... I didn't realise what I was dealing with. Until he was chasing me and calling me 'Fat Boy' as I ran for my life down the aisles..."

He shut the book.

"But this isn't helping. If there was some other person involved with us back then, we're not going to find them in a book about the history of Derry."

"Maybe we're going about this the wrong way," Stan mused, staring pensively at an Annual of Derry 1957 book. He got to his feet, and nodded his head towards the section which chronicled journals, articles and yearbooks.

"I think we should try the Derry yearbooks."

Ben wasn't sure what he meant, but got to his feet all the same and followed Stan towards the yearbook section of the library, hoping he was right that they would find something useful there.

* * *

George patiently waited until they had walked 15 minutes from the inn, and then turned to Bev, who eyed him with an unsurprised look on her face.

"I know what you're going to ask," she said, a little glumly.

"Of course I'm going to ask," he said. "No one's here now, so no more excuses. What happened?"

She grimaced, only the faintest hint of her swollen cheek visible now as a very light bruise on her cheekbone. Refusing to meet his eyes, and only looking straight ahead in the direction they were walking, she sighed.

"One thing you should know first, George," she said reluctantly. "I'm actually married now."

George's stunned silence was enough to make her blush, somewhat uncharacteristically.

"Oh, don't look so surprised," she laughed. "It's been a lot time since anyone's called me Smelly Marsh or Beaverly. I actually get hit on fairly regularly in my line of work, you know."

"I'm not surprised that people are attracted to you," George said honestly. Ben's lovesick face floated in the back of his mind. "I'm just surprised you got married. And you didn't tell any of us last night?"

He stopped walking, suddenly worried. "And what does that have to do with your cheek?"

"Well... Tom didn't really want me to come," Bev admitted, also stopping. "He's a bit possessive..."

"Wait, he _hit_ you?" George said, angrily. "Who is this guy?"

"He's the CEO of my fashion company... and one of the more persistent suitors. He's not an awful person really... but there are elements of him that are..."

"Abusive," George finished for her, knowing that probably wasn't the word she would choose to use. The thought of Bev's rather terrifying father crossed his mind. He'd only been five when he'd come across the towering man in the supermarket, after getting separated from his mother. Even at that age, he had known there wasn't something right in the man's eyes when he asked if George was lost. And watching him pull his daughter roughly by the arm after him as they left the store later had only confirmed his mistrust of the man, parent or not. Back then, Alvin Marsh had been one of the only adults to scare George Denbrough. Until he met Pennywise, of course.

"Bev... was it a one-off? Or does he..."

Her averted eyes, a little guilty, told him all he needed to know. He weighed his words in his head, knowing that he couldn't keep them to himself.

"This whole situation... it's all pretty messed up, you know," he said finally. "I don't know what comes after this... this showdown with Pennywise. Maybe nothing. Maybe this is the end of us. But if there is an after... if we make it somehow... don't go back to him, Bev. Believe me when I say you can do better. That there are people out there who love you and won't hurt you like that. Just... just think about it, okay?"

She nodded, her eyes a little shiny, managing a small smile. Before George knew it, she had enveloped him in a hug, pulling him tight towards her. He was amazed again at how much taller than her he was now, he only remembered her being a head taller than him when they were younger. She'd left for Portland only months after the encounter with Pennywise, having stayed with Stan's family until moving to live with her aunt. He hadn't kept touch with her after that, but he remembered hearing from Stan about her early successes in design and fashion.

"Thanks George," she said softly. "I forget how much good there was in our little Losers Club. The real world is kind of shit sometimes... I often wish I could have stayed a kid forever."

They broke apart, and then continued in a comfortable silence through the town, a silence which grew increasingly uncomfortable the closer they got to the Neibolt house. It was as if the air in the vicinity of that house was thicker, heavier, darker. George couldn't deny the feeling of doom that began to grow in his chest, nor the anxiety of not knowing what they would find when they walked through the doorway.

Finally, the two of them were standing outside the house, looking through the rusty gate at the overgrown garden and rotting wooden planks of the old rundown house. It used to be known as the place where crackheads would congregate, but even that had died down over the years. No one dared go near the house anymore, and it was pretty clear why, when standing out the front. The whole place exuded darkness, to an extent that almost seemed visible. It would have been less foreboding if someone had stuck a "DANGER DO NOT ENTER" sign out the front.

"Well," George said, glancing sideways at Bev. "You've done this before right?"

"More or less," she said, her eyes fixed on the dark upper windows of the house. Despite her calm exterior, George could see in her eyes that she was a bit wary about entering the house. There was the faintest flicker of fear on her face. He reached out and grabbed her hand, reassuringly.

"For the sake of our memories," he said, squeezing gently.

"For our memories," Bev whispered, scared of what those memories might reveal. About herself, about the others, and about the past that they'd long forgotten. But both she and George knew that finding out the truth was vitally important, regardless of how much it might hurt. And somewhere, deep down, she knew it _would_ hurt.

Together, they stepped through the gate towards the shadowed front door of 29 Neibolt Street.

* * *

"I always liked this place," Eddie said in a faraway voice, sitting on the edge of a mossy log while Richie kicked at the water-darkened stones. "It's funny really, because it was probably the place we were closest to the clown... and yet somehow I always felt safe here."

Richie didn't respond, just scanned the area again as if to try and bring a purpose to their time in the Barrens. They'd been here half an hour already, and there was literally nothing offering them any clues as to their shrouded past. The area was just as green and overgrown as it had ever been, the shallow river bubbling through the stones as it passed by. There were some traces that kids still played down here occasionally, in the scattered unnatural stacks of stones and some half-hearted attempts at dams. Nothing like Ben's monstrosity though, which had easily flooded this entire area way back when.

"I guess I agree," Richie said at last, looking back at Eddie. "This place does have a certain peacefulness about it. Weird that a gateway to hell sits just over there."

He cast his gaze to the sewer entrance, which always seemed shadowed in more darkness than was reasonable. They both didn't say the thought that crossed their minds then: here was an obvious place they should look that they hadn't yet. Neither of them wanted to go too close to the sewer though, for fear of accidentally stumbling across something they didn't want to. Or even worse, across Pennywise himself.

"You really gave up all your fake meds, huh?" Richie asked, changing the subject quickly. Eddie looked at him, a little startled.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "I still have the inhaler... but it's mostly just to keep me calm. Somehow having it there is comforting in a way I can't properly explain."

"A safety blanket, duh," Richie said, shrugging. "It's not that complicated."

"Maybe." Eddie's hand closed around the inhaler in his pocket. He looked at the forest behind them. "It seemed so much thicker when we were kids, huh? The trees were taller... the forest was bigger. I almost don't believe we're in the same place sometimes."

He got to his feet, and headed for the edge of the forest, near where Ben had led the assembly of his impressive dam. Richie watched him go, thinking to himself that perhaps Eddie had made the most progress of all since their childhood. None of them had ever expected that he would give up his health-related hang-ups imposed upon him by his crazy mother, and yet here he was with only an inhaler to show for it. It seemed that standing up to his mum on the day they left to save Beverly, and throwing the "gazebos" on the ground, had really been a turning point for Eddie Kasprak. It was probably only consolidated by the death of his mother a few months later, from nothing other than a good old-fashioned heart attack thanks solely to her sedentary lifestyle and excess weight.

"Richie," Eddie's voice came sharply. "Come here."

Richie broke out of his memory and saw Eddie looking at him expectantly, pointing at the trunk of a particular tree. He walked over quickly, avoiding the pooling water nearby, to investigate what had Eddie so worked up. It looked to be a carving in the tree, around their shoulder height. But near to thirty years ago, when the old tree was shorter, the carving would have been easily at kid height.

The carving Eddie had found was circular in shape, etched in deeply by a knife a long time ago. In the centre was an ornately-carved "LC" in calligraphic style.

"Loser's Club," Eddie pointed out. He only had the vaguest recollection of this carving. He couldn't even remember when they had done it, but he knew they had. Underneath were some block letters spelling out "LUCKY SEVEN". Then, around the words were initials, each with their own style and characteristics, each engraved by a different child. Richie ran his hand across each of them, reading out the initials aloud as he went.

"BH, BM, EK, RT, MH, SU..." he paused, his eyes blurry for a moment, as if he had dust in them, and then suddenly clearing up. His fingers rested on the last set of initials, arguably the most intricately carved of them all. "WD?"

Eddie stared at him in shock. "That wasn't there a second ago. That was what I thought was weird... it said Lucky Seven but there were only six sets of initials. What the _hell_ , Richie? What did you do?"

"I didn't _do_ anything," Richie said resentfully. "It was just there when I looked. Maybe you're the one who needs glasses, not me..."

"This is really weird," Eddie mused, already turning back to the carving. "Who is WD?"

"Walt Disney, obviously," Richie joked. "He was my best buddy in school, don't you remember?"

"Seriously, Richie. _WD_? I don't have the faintest idea who that could be."

"Sorry, Eds, neither do I..."

Richie pulled his mobile phone from his back pocket, and took a photo of the carving.

"Ah, the age of digital technology," he grinned at Eddie. "We can show this to the others when we get back, I've got zero signal out here. What a backwater..."

"Some things never change," Eddie smiled back. "Well, at least we found something."

They both looked at each other, and then back to the sewer entrance.

"We're going to have to look, aren't we?" Richie said, a sense of dread creeping into his tone.

"Yeah..." Eddie said faintly. But nonetheless, he made a start towards the sewer entrance, despite being clearly nervous. Sighing, Richie pocketed his phone again and followed Eddie towards the sewer, really hoping that Pennywise wasn't going to greet them as they entered.

* * *

 _Both everywhere and nowhere, from afar and very close, the Turtle watched against its will. As it did with all of creation, it followed the pathways and choices of the self-declared Losers Club over time. But unlike the others, it found itself particularly drawn to their plight, found itself constantly at the edge of interfering where it had sworn never to. Found itself watching them a little too closely._

 _The latest incident was just one of a number of slip-ups. If the Turtle was being honest with itself, it had never been entirely happy with how the dark one interfered to no end on Earth, while it had kept to its vow of interfering as little as possible. It believed that the choices of the humans should be their own, as with the fates that followed those choices. And yet it found itself growing more and more resentful of how the Other harmed the humans, of the pain it inflicted on them and the joy it took from that pain._

 _The fate of Bill Denbrough pained the Turtle in a way it never thought possible. The light of that particular human had shone so brightly, so much so that the Turtle had guided Bill where it could, always subtly but always in whatever way it felt was within the bounds of its self-imposed distance. If it had been able to stop the clown from taking Bill's brother, it would have. But then, the purity of Bill's heart in searching for his younger brother had made his light shine all the brighter. He had brought the children together, and they'd gotten so close to defeating the Turtle's enemy. So very close... The Turtle had truly hoped that Bill would lead the Losers Club to victory against the creature, and the nearest thing the Turtle had to a heart had broken a little bit when Bill sacrificed himself for George._

 _But the fate of the humans was their own, after all. The Turtle had decided that, and to that truth it must cling. And yet, here it was, peeling back a little of the fog from the memories of Bill's friends, trying in vain to lead them to a conclusion that would inevitably present itself anyway. But there was a reason for pressing the old wounds, for lifting the fog as soon as possible. The fate of Bill Denbrough was uncertain, and the darkness in his heart was worrying. It would reach a tipping point soon, when the flickers of light remaining might not be able to stop the darkness from overflowing._

 _By then, it might be too late._

 _The Turtle had hoped this chain of events might finally be the right one. That Bill's sacrifice was, in some way, necessary to save the others that might be lost otherwise along the path to the end. It had watched with interest as George Denbrough changed the fate of Stanley Uris, not once now, but twice. It saw some of the same light that Bill possessed in the younger Denbrough, which reassured the Turtle a little. Despite itself, it worried for the fate of the Losers. The creature that called itself Pennywise the Dancing Clown was stronger than ever, the Turtle could sense this. The delicate balance of the universe was under threat, as the dark one's power grew and grew. There was so much fear in the world now, and so much potential for chaos._

 _For the Turtle, which had always represented peace and joy and order, it was a worrying time indeed. The clown's power had grown so much that the Turtle could not have lent Bill enough magic to escape over the last few decades, although it had tried. Bill's strength of heart had responded to the Turtle's power, and yet combined it was not enough. So the Turtle would do what it could in the meantime, and provide whatever small assistance to the remainder of the Losers Club, in the hope that they combined might be able to save Bill, and fight back against Pennywise._

 _It looked mournfully at the fatelines of the Losers, and George. The children had never deserved any of this. They had deserved an innocent childhood, and the brightest of memories to look back fondly upon._

 _Maybe it was finally time for the Turtle to take a more active role in preserving the balance. Maybe the way it had always played out had never been fair at all, and by abiding by its own moralistic rules, it had been all too responsible in producing the current imbalance._

 _Maybe, together with the noble intentions of the now-grown-up children, it could help stave off the darkness... at least for a little while._


	9. Chapter 9

_Note: Oh man! I am so sorry for the delay on this chapter. Christmas happened, then I was away in January for a work trip for two weeks and then got back and chaos. Much chaos. Also, I was a little stuck on what exactly I wanted to go down in this chapter vs. the next one. Then, I finally finished it and couldn't upload, seems like FF is having some weird server issues. In the meantime, the only way around it was to edit an old chapter... Anyway. So here, finally, is the next chapter. Sorry to those who thought I might have quit writing the fic due to the long gap between the last chapter and this one - I do intend to finish it :) Still working out the details of how it gets to where it will end, and still needing to finish reading the book, but eventually. Hope you guys will stick around to see it end with me! Let me know your thoughts about this chapter, keen to hear what you think, if the FF servers will allow it :D_

* * *

 _The afternoon sun was sinking fast, but remained warm on their skin as they gathered in the grassy field near the Barrens. Though the season was shifting into fall soon, it still felt like the height of summer with the insects buzzing around them and the sunlight reflecting off the water of the canal. One of the last beautiful days of the summer, at sharp contrast to their defeated and sullen moods._

 _"I feel like we're getting further away," Ben said glumly, kicking at a stone half-buried in the dirt._

 _The seven of them were sitting in a circle in a small clearing amidst the tall grass. There were the six of the original Losers Club, each sharing a similar look of despair on their faces, having just emerged from another fruitless search in the sewers: Ben, Beverly, Stan, Eddie, Richie and Mike. The seventh was smaller, younger, and looked especially fragile these days with the bandaged stump of a right arm poking out from his shirt: George Denbrough. As soon as he had been checked out of the hospital, a week after his admission, he'd insisted on joining the others in the search for his brother, as determined as they were to find him and save him from the clown._

 _"When we started, I thought I could still feel Bill's presence down there, somewhere," Bev mused. "Even though we seemed to just be going around in circles, he was there, just out of our reach. Now... now it's so faint, it's almost gone."_

 _"I don't feel scared down there anymore," Eddie admitted, a little guiltily. "Something is changing, and the sewers don't seem as ominous as they once did."_

 _"What does it mean?" Richie said, a shiver creeping into his voice. "Are we losing him?"_

 _"Losing Billy?" Georgie repeated, fear in his small voice. He looked to Eddie for reassurance, the boy who had grown up with Bill, his brother's oldest friend. Eddie just sniffled a little, and grabbed for his puffer._

 _Richie had put into simple words what they all were beginning to fear: that with each passing day it was getting harder and harder to find Pennywise's lair, and they were consequently getting further and further away from Bill. None of them wanted to acknowledge it, but in their hearts the realisation was growing. Pennywise had somehow cloaked the lair from their view, and they had as much hope of finding it again now as they did of truly vanquishing the clown from existence. The moment they'd left the sewers with Georgie, they'd committed themselves to leaving Bill behind._

 _"We can't give up," Bev said, a choked sob escaping from her throat. "We can't leave him down there..."_

 _They all looked at each other, the fear they'd spent all summer trying to overcome now clearly visible in their eyes._

 _"Fuck," Richie said, dropping his face into his hands. He suddenly started and glanced sideways. "Sorry, Georgie."_

 _Georgie meanwhile was silent, his eyes hooded and fixed on a scraggly dandelion growing in the dirt in front of his feet. His seven year old self was still coming to terms with everything that happened: chasing his boat, meeting the clown, getting dragged into the sewers, losing 10 months of his life to a black dreamless sleep, returning without his right arm only to find that the clown was gone, and so too was his big brother. His idol, his hero, his best friend... and now his saviour._

 _"What do we do?" Stan asked. "If we really are getting further away, then continuing to look is..."_

 _"Pointless," Mike finished his sentence dully. "It's pointless."_

 _Bev looked around the faces of the dejected Losers, who now counted Georgie amongst their ranks. The hope they had had on their first return to the sewers, the confidence that finding Bill was just hours away, had faded away to be replaced with a dark hopelessness that was beginning to consume them all. And worst of all, she knew in her heart that had Bill been here, like always he would have known what to do._

 _Bev got to her feet._

 _"We'll make a promise," she said determinedly, knowing without knowing that this was what they had to do. That this was what Bill would have done._

 _"A promise?" Richie echoed._

 _"Yes," she said, pointing at a sliver of Coke bottle near Stan's feet. Confused, Stan picked it up and also got to his feet. The others followed suit, including Georgie. The six Losers and a Loser's little brother, standing in the rapidly fading sunlight of a summer day that would eventually fade from all of their memories, even Mike._

 _"We'll swear it," Bev said. "That if - when - Pennywise returns, we all come back too. We'll stop him, and we'll rescue Bill. That's the promise."_

 _"What if he doesn't come back?" Stan asked nervously._

 _Eddie smiled at him but it didn't reach his eyes._

 _"Then we don't come back either," he said softly. They all knew in their hearts that their time together in Derry was drawing to a close. That after the showdown with Pennywise, their circle was disintegrating, as was the mystical power that had held them all together. Just like they also knew that the thought of Pennywise never returning was a whimsical wish upon a star. But at least if Pennywise came back one day, so did their chances of finding Bill._

 _"What if Bill is-" Richie began, but fell short as his eyes rested on Georgie._

 _"He's not dead," Georgie said firmly, his eyes alight with the fire of belief. "He's not."_

 _In that moment, he reminded them all of his brother and the determination with which Bill Denbrough had searched for George over the last year._

 _"Do it, Stan," Beverly said, gesturing at her palms open in front of him. "Do all of us." She hesitated for a moment, looking at George._

 _"You don't have to do this, Georgie," she said. "You've given enough blood for one year, I'd say."_

 _"I'll promise too," Georgie said stubbornly, holding out the one palm he had. He knew what a blood oath was, he'd heard about them in the books that Bill used to read to him. Books about adventures and promises and friendships that conquered all._

 _Bev bit her lip, then nodded._

 _Stan solemnly made his way around the circle with the glinting piece of glass, slashing lightly across each pair of outstretched palms. The blood jumped to the surface of their skin instantly, pooled shallowly as they waited for the others to also be given their mark. Stan's face was pale as Georgie held out his hand to him, brow set and eyes hard. He might have been younger than all of them, but the look on his face told them he was no less determined to keep the promise. Despite this, his face scrunched in pain and his eyes welled up as Stan made the cut across his palm. And yet, though the tears were brimming, he did not let out a cry nor did he let the tears fall. Their hearts panged for the smallest among them, and for all he had gone through only to come back to a lost brother. Stan put his hand briefly on Georgie's shoulder, with a grim smile._

 _Finally, Stan stepped back, cut his own palms, and joined the circle._

 _They all linked hands (with the exception of the gap between George's right arm and Richie's left hand), gripping each other tightly with the knowledge that they would never be as close as they were now, not ever again. And all of them all the more aware of the gaping hole in their circle, the one that had once been filled by Bill._

 _"Swear it," Bev said to them, squeezing the palms of Ben and Stan on either side of her. "Swear it, for Bill."_

 _"I swear," Ben nodded without hesitation._

 _"I swear it," Eddie said, a quiver in his voice._

 _"I swear," Richie affirmed, clearly wanting to make a joke but somehow resisting._

 _"I swear too," Mike said, eyes firm._

 _"I swear," Georgie said quietly. "For Billy."_

 _"I... I swear," Stan said finally, the last to commit his promise. They stood there, holding hands, for what felt like an eternity, as the wind breezed through the grass around them and the insects started their nighttime singing, welcoming the return of the warm night and farewelling the setting sun. Finally, the moment was broken and they split off, one by one, their hearts lighter for having made the promise but heavier for the weight of what that promise would bring their future selves._

 _Georgie was the third last to leave, waving goodbye as he made his way back towards the suburbs of Derry. He glanced back once, to see Bev and Ben standing next to each other staring out across the glittering water of the canal, so peaceful now as if it had never been haunted by a demon clown. In the red sunlight, Bev's hair glowed a bright amber around her ears._

 _It reminded George of fire._

 _And in that moment he did believe Bev when she said that they would come back one day and save his brother. Until then, he hoped with all his heart that Billy would be okay._

* * *

 _It's here, I know it. Somewhere in here._

Mike sat cross-legged on the floor of the borrowed conference room, staring up at his collection. There was a dull pain in his forehead, the consequence of too much squinting at old newspaper articles and not enough eating or drinking. With a vague sort of amusement, he realised he hadn't eaten or drank anything since their entree at Jim's last night, and it was now approaching lunchtime.

He wondered a little how the others were getting on, since it had been a couple of hours since they all departed. He hadn't heard from anyone, and was beginning to wonder if his mobile phone was working properly. He looked resentfully at the offending screen, which showed full reception. It was also possible that the others didn't have reception, but that seemed particularly unlikely in the case of Ben and Stan. _Maybe they were simply engrossed in digging through the history of Derry_ , Mike thought. He wouldn't have minded the history trip himself, especially to one of his favourite places in the world (well, not that he was so well-travelled really), but someone needed to stay with the materials and try to coordinate from afar. As the person who'd also stayed in Derry, he felt naturally like he was the one to assume that role. He wondered what his father would think of him now: Michael Hanlon, Losers Club Coordinator.

It didn't feel right to call himself the Chief. That title had never belonged to him, he knew that instinctively, even if he didn't yet remember who their chief had really been. He turned his attention back to the collection of materials, frustrated that he had made no progress even since assembling it as he had. He knew the timeline of the previous events like the back of his hand. George Denbrough went missing in October 1988. Following that, a string of disappearances and murders that slowly woke the town of Derry to the possibility of a real threat. And yet, wherever there was some other "logical" explanation for the disappearance of the children, as there had been in the case of Eddie Corcoran, that was always the explanation that the police chose to endorse. And the events had culminated in their face-off against Pennywise in the sewers beneath Derry, where they had (somehow) managed to retrieve George and make it out of there with their lives. They'd made the promise to return sometime in September 1989, but the details were still kind of foggy in his head.

 _I know all this... why can't I see what we're missing?_

Mike sighed. Perhaps if he had also gone out on one of the intelligence-gathering missions (thinking of it that way made him feel more like a master spy coordinator), he would have been presented with some new material to digest. One of the problems was that, despite hanging it all up in this new way, despite all the photos and articles and notes, it was still the same set of documents he'd be pouring over for nearly thirty years. His knowledge of why he cared so much about the dark history of Derry had wavered in and out, like his memories, but he'd always known it was important. So he'd look through them all from time to time and try to make the links between it all.

He'd come to one conclusion over time, that the rampage of Pennywise on the town of Derry had been happening regularly for hundreds of years in cycles, and it was definitely getting worse. More casualties, more violence, darker ends. More children being taken, either to be found later mutilated nearly beyond recognition or never seen again. If what the clown had revealed last night at the dinner was true, that he was more powerful than ever, then the old Losers Club really did have their work cut out for them if they were going to try and stop him. It. The creature that they couldn't begin to really understand.

His mobile phone rang suddenly. Stunned out of his reverie, Mike picked up. It was Ben.

"Hi Mike," came the other voice, a slight southern twang in the accent. The disappointment in his voice conveyed what his words had not yet: he and Stan had not found much in their search of the library.

"Any luck?" Mike asked.

"Well, not really," Ben confessed. "Nothing stunning. We've checked out a couple of yearbooks from when we were kids in case that shows anything, but quickly looking through it we didn't see much."

"Checked out?" Mike repeated, amused.

"Yeah, renewed my library card from when I spent all my time there as a kid," Ben laughed. "A souvenir of this forsaken town to take home with me, if we ever leave."

"I'm not sure where you're going with the yearbooks, but I'm curious all the same," Mike said. "Haven't looked at those for many years."

"It was a hunch that Stan had," Ben said. "Didn't really pay out though."

"All the same," Mike said. "It's worth us all taking a look."

"Yeah. Any word from the others?"

"No, you're the first to check in."

"Ah, okay," Ben said, sounding a little worried.

"I'm sure they're fine," Mike reassured him, quashing down his own concern. "It's only been a couple of hours."

"Yeah," Ben said again. "Okay, see you soon."

"Yep, see you soon," Mike said, and hung up. As if on cue, his stomach growled, and he decided it was about time to head over to the hotel's bistro and eat something. He got to his feet, pocketed his phone and cast a cursory glance over the materials. It should be safe enough until he got back, he had the key to the room after all. It just didn't feel right leaving everything here, in case someone should stumble upon it and get suspicious. They had enough on their hands dealing with Pennywise, and the added suspicion of Derry townsfolk in the wake of the recent murders... that would hardly be helpful.

He shut the door, locked it carefully, checked it twice and then made his way towards the wafting smell of food.

* * *

The door swung eerily open as they approached, silently welcoming them to enter the decaying house. Bev and George exchanged a nervous look, the desire to run away growing in them as the invisible hand of Pennywise revealed that he was perfectly aware of their presence. They were still gripping each other's hands, and neither let go as they ascended the rotting stairs. As they neared the door, Bev stopped suddenly, and let go of George's hand.

"I... I don't know if I can do this, George," she whispered, eyes fixed on the shadows beyond the doorway. "Not again."

"We have to, Bev," George said. "Together, we'll be okay."

She didn't look very convinced, but she nodded a little, drew a breath, and was the first of them to step through the rotting archway. On the other side, she flinched a little as if expecting something to jump out at her, but the house was shrouded and still. She shrugged back at Georgie, who then stepped through after her. They were standing in the hallway of what had perhaps once been a very nice house, but had for decades been falling further and further into the current decrepit state it was in.

Bev looked to the left, to see the spiderwebs still hanging down where Richie had once found a flyer with his face on it. He'd showed them all in the aftermath, once Pennywise had slunk off in defeat having failed to attack Eddie. Bev remembered that the "lookouts", herself included, had charged into the house at just the right time, but she couldn't remember the details of how they'd fought the clown. She knew it had been a close call with Eddie though, and somehow they'd gathered some sort of power over Pennywise which had given them the advantage. She wished she could remember how.

"I hate this place," she shuddered. "Where should we look?"

"I don't know," George admitted. "This is all new to me. Where did you guys go last time?"

Bev paused, thinking back.

"I was outside most of the time. But I think the others... they went upstairs. And we were also in the kitchen when we fought Pennywise. He was about to attack Eddie, but something stopped him... and we knew somehow at that moment to run in. It's all a bit foggy, like everything else."

"How about the kitchen, then?"

She nodded, and led the way across the dusty floorboards to the hollow shell that was once a kitchen. A rusty fridge sat obtrusively in the middle, its door hanging open. She brushed her hand against it, partly also to check that it was actually there and not just an illusion conjured up by the clown.

"He... _it_... came out of there," she gestured to George, whose brow furrowed. Bev could easily guess the thoughts running through his logical mind, about the volume of the fridge interior, and stifled a giggle. Somehow, George was still holding this otherworldly being up against the rules of physics that determined their world.

George's eyes left the fridge, and scanned the area. It was all covered in dust, like the rest of the house, as if they were peering into a world coloured in sepia. Scratches and a pattern of blackened blotches on the floor were the only hints that something dark had taken place in this kitchen, and seemed at sharp contrast to the bright sunlight filtering through the window. He came to the conclusion, reluctantly, that there were no useful clues to be found here in the kitchen. He looked to Bev, and saw from her expression that she had reached the same conclusion.

"Upstairs, then," she said, with as much enthusiasm as he felt.

They made their way up the creaking staircase, neither of them liking the way it loudly announced their presence to the rest of the house. George could hear scurrying tiny feet, always out of sight but always nearby. It probably wasn't surprising that a house this decrepit was infested with rats.

At the top of the staircase, in unfamiliar territory to both of them, they found themselves standing in front of a long narrow hallway. There was washed-out light filling the room at the end of the hallway, but it was otherwise empty. Neither of them knew they were standing in the same hallway where Eddie, Richie and Bill had watched the ghost of Betty Ripsom be torn away as she screamed at them for help. And yet somehow they both knew this was the direction they should go in, instinctively.

"What are we even looking for in here?" Bev muttered, clearly uneasy about proceeding further into the house.

"Anything that might give us a clue for what Pennywise is hiding from us," George whispered, feeling a little silly for speaking in a hushed voice but not wanting to speak too loudly in the quietness of the ominous house.

They entered the room, but barely had enough time to glance around it when the door behind them slammed shut with a huge bang, followed by the wooden shutters on the window rattling down to plunge the small room into murky shadows and stirring up clouds of dust around them. Both of them closed their eyes against the dust, blinking painfully through squinted eyes at the now-darkened room.

"George?" Bev asked in a panicked voice.

"Bev?"

"You're not grabbing my arm, are you..."

George turned, looking through the dust to see a shadowy figure standing next to Bev. At the same time, she made out the source of the hand on her upper arm, and screamed, wrenching her arm out of the thing's grasp and jolting towards George, their backs toward the window.

The figure lurched a little towards them, smelling strongly of stagnant water and dampness, covered in swampy leaves and other watery tendrils. The hair around its head was long and matted, and darkened red with what looked like blood which also ran in thin streams down the shadowed face. Both George and Bev edged backwards as the figured came towards them, until its face was illuminated by a thin beam of light shining through the shutters.

George gasped, recognising the figure suddenly.

"Bowers," Bev breathed, her voice barely above a whisper. It was none other than the crazed teenage gang leader who had made their lives frequently and utterly miserable, and gotten close to actually killing members of the Losers Club several times towards the end of that summer. He'd very nearly finished Mike off in their struggle next to the well, and then the last time they'd seen him was watching him plummet to certain death down the well shaft, horrified and yet thankful that it hadn't been Mike to meet an ugly fate at the hands of the ruthless Bowers.

Bowers, or the manifestation of him, leered at them through the hair hanging in his eyes. Some metallic glinted in his right hand, a flash of metal belonging to his beloved switchblade. Although the Bowers before them was not the real Bowers, the switch-blade was. And it was clear that he wanted to use it on them.

"Wanna float, Bev?" he grinned at her, teeth cracked and chipped and covered with dark clumps of mould. He advanced closer, forcing both George and Beverly to back further towards the window. Neither of them made any sudden movements, as if they were dealing with a dangerous wild animal which might be triggered by the slightest quick motion. Aside from the door that had slammed shut, there was one other closed door behind Bowers. George guessed it was probably also being held physically shut by the same force that had slammed the other door.

Bev glanced at George, eyes wide, clearly pressing him for what the plan was. He shook his head slightly, not having the slightest clue. Bowers was only a few paces away from them now, and that switchblade was looking extremely sharp in his half-rotten hand.

"Oh Georgie, you never were my favourite Denbrough," Bowers switched his focus to George, who looked at him in confusion, well aware that he was really talking to the clown behind the Henry Bowers mask.

"You knew my parents?" he asked, blinking. Bowers seemed to find this greatly amusing, and cackled with laughter, before suddenly dropping the amused face and charging with a deathly scream towards George.

Instinctively, George braced himself against the window and kicked both legs out in front of him, desperate to keep the knife away from him and Bev. His shoes impacted Bowers' stomach and sent him flying backwards, crashing to the wooden floor in a dusty heap. Bev saw the opportunity and rushed for the door they'd come through, pulling at the handle but it wouldn't budge. Bowers was getting to his feet now, snarling, his mouth replaced by a widening chasm filled with thousands of sharp teeth, twisting at his face and ripping the rotting flesh apart as it grew.

"It won't go!" Bev cried, kicking at the door. George looked around, for anything, a weapon or an escape, but they were trapped in the room with the clown. The swamp-version of Bowers was transitioning slowly towards Pennywise's usual guise, with bright orange pom poms now lining down his old blackened shirt and his eyes gleaming yellow in the darkened room.

"With you out of the way, it'll be two down and five to go," sang Bowers, dark matted hair now lightening rapidly. He charged at Bev, tackling her away from the door to the ground and leaning over her, teeth only inches from her face and drool dripping from his mouth. She was hitting at him with all her strength, but it only seemed to mildly annoy him. George was about to run at him and try to throw him off her, when a sudden inspiration occurred to him out of nowhere, and he instead ran to the window and yanked down the shutters with as much force as he could.

Light spilled into the room, filling it with the warm glow of the sun and causing Pennywise, surprisingly, to hiss in pain and draw back from Bev, glaring at George now. No longer did he have the appearance of Bowers, he had completely returned to his clown suit attire, and as he got to his feet, he seemed taller and more menacing than ever. George didn't know how or why the sunlight has interfered with him, but it was clear that it had and that the clown was extremely angry now.

But when he spoke, it was as if neither Bev nor George were in the room.

"After all this time, you come out of hiding?" he snarled, looking past George at the sunlight streaming through the window. " _You_ , the coward at the edge of the worlds?"

George looked at Bev, who was looking equally puzzled at the sudden turn of events.

" _This isn't over_ ," Pennywise growled, enunciating every word sharply. "I'll have them _all_."

He then screeched in what sounded like a mix of pain and frustration, and stomped one foot heavily on the creaky wooden floorboards, shattering them beneath him to reveal a splintered gaping hole. With one last furious sweep of the room, his murderous yellow eyes fixing only briefly on George and Bev, he jumped through the hole he had opened and disappeared from view. The floorboards behind him rearranged themselves, the dust settling over them again as if there had never been a hole at all.

But there was one difference. Left behind, as dusty and worn as its surroundings, was a single object where the hole had once been.

A waxed paper boat.

And on its side, the clumsily written letters: _S.S. Georgie_.


	10. Chapter 10

_Note: Well, here we are again with a much overdue chapter. It's been a crazy month! I apologise for the wait, and thank you heaps to all those who have left reviews - it's great to know that people are keen to find out what happens next in this different iteration of the Loser's Club :) To make up for the long wait, this is actually the longest chapter so far (not by much but anyway). I'll try to update more quickly in future, but can't promise anything, I seem to go from crazy time to crazy time lately :p Where this story goes next is slowly forming in my head, I still don't have an exact idea of how it all comes together but it's getting there! Meanwhile I'm maybe 4/5 through the actual book (finally) and might actually manage to finish it on my next flight. Exciting times! As always, please let me know what you think, and hope you enjoy the new chapter :D_

* * *

 _"There's a light in the bedroom  
_ _But it's dark  
_ _Scattered around on the floor  
_ _All my thoughts..."  
_ \- Get Home, Bastille

* * *

"Damn, this place smells just as bad as it ever did."

In a familiar callback to their past selves, Eddie hovered near the entrance to the sewer reluctantly as Richie splashed through the murky water ahead of him, his voice bouncing hollowly off the tunnel walls. Eddie's nose wrinkled at the smell, years of his mother's paranoia still just inches beneath his seemingly calm exterior. As much progress as he'd made in the time since she'd passed, giving up most of his hang-ups and pseudo-drugs, old habits were so hard to shake and he often found himself blanching at the sight of anything remotely germ-infested.

"Oh, come on, Eds," Richie laughed. "You're not still scared of the grey water, are you?"

"No," Eddie said stubbornly, stepping into the sewer after him. He didn't like the way his shoes squelched on hidden soggy bits beneath the surface of the water, didn't like to think what those things might be. This was, after all, Pennywise's domain. Who knew what lurked beneath the surface? He realised he _really_ didn't want to know the answer to that question.

"What are we going to find in here, honestly?" he pressed Richie in a low voice, glancing back longingly at the afternoon sunlight reflecting off the water outside, seemingly so close and so distant.

"Clues, duh," Richie shrugged. "Like that stupid tree outside..."

The fact that he couldn't place the initials they'd found obviously bothered Richie, a tangible piece of evidence that their memories weren't all right after all. It was one thing to vaguely suspect that there was a part of their past Pennywise was keeping hidden from them, and it was another thing to confirm it. That there had been another in their circle, and they just couldn't remember for the life of them who.

 _What traitors we are,_ Richie mused to himself. He kicked at the water below, splashing it ahead of him.

"Do you think we really forgot one of us?" Eddie murmured softly, voicing aloud Richie's own thoughts. "One of the Losers?"

"God, I sure hope not," Richie said, continuing to kick at the water as they proceeded along the tunnel. He jumped back as his foot connected with a small solid object that he'd sent clinking against the sewer wall. He immediately got his phone out, activating the light to find what it was that he'd kicked. With a grimace, he reached down and pulled a small rectangular object out of the shallow water.

Holding it up in front of Eddie, its surface illuminated by the harsh white phone light, Richie made a disgusted noise. It was a lighter, years and years old, and they both knew exactly who it belonged to. He turned off his phone light, returning them both to the washed-out darkness illuminated only slightly by the light beyond the sewer, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Patrick Hockstetter," Eddie said, giving sound to a name neither of them really liked to hear.

"That bastard," Richie muttered, remembering all too clearly the strange lackey of Henry Bowers. In a lot of ways, he had been far more scared of Hockstetter than Bowers as a kid. There'd always been a darkness in him that seemed dangerous in a way that even Bowers himself did not quite manage.

Absently, he flicked the lid back and ran his thumb along the rusted wheel, surprised when the lighter sparked to life, lighting the damp walls around them with its orange flickering glow.

"I can't believe it still works," Eddie said, sounding a bit in awe. "It really shouldn't after all this time."

"Yeah," Richie agreed, staring at it, feeling a bit more horrified than awed. The last time it'd been in the possession of its owner was when Patrick had been chasing the slashed-up Ben, hoping to do who knew what to the bleeding fat kid. He'd only heard the story later from Ben and Eddie, but it had sounded pretty terrifying. Hiding in the sewers had occurred to them, of course, and it was lucky they hadn't. Patrick Hockstetter had entered the sewers believing that was their hiding place, and had never been seen again. He hoped with all his being that Hockstetter himself would not be the next thing to surface from the sewer water.

Swallowing the sudden lump in his throat, he abruptly snapped shut the lighter and pocketed it. The darkness greeted them once more, and it was not so welcome. Eddie hastily got his own phone out and turned the light on.

"Okay, a lighter, great, can we go now?" he said, his voice edgy. But the light from his phone had already illuminated something else floating on the surface nearby, something pink and papery. Richie knelt down next to it, examining the item with a puzzled look on his face. It was a cupcake wrapper, the kind usually seen at children's birthday parties filled with a tiny sponge cake and overly decorated with icing and sparkly sugar.

"I wonder if Pennywise had a birthday party down here," Richie mused aloud, knowing that the truth of this wrapper was far darker than that. Eddie leaned over him to look at the wrapper, a frown on his face.

"You know what this means, right?" Eddie said, looking again back towards the entrance to the sewer.

"No?"

"This tunnel is important, it's an entry and exit point for Pennywise," Eddie gestured ahead of them, towards the darkness. "I know last time we went down to the lair through the house of Neibolt street..."

He trailed off, the memories of that house painful in more ways than one.

"Well, anyway, maybe we'll have better luck coming this way," Eddie finished, suppressing the thoughts of the leper and the clown and the way his broken arm had dangled limply in front of him. "I can't explain _why_ , I just have a feeling this tunnel will be important somehow."

Richie cocked his head to the side, looking at Eddie strangely for a moment. Eddie shifted uncomfortably under the gaze, not sure what was going through Richie's head. Finally, his friend spoke.

"I wonder if we'd all do a lot better listening to those inexplicable feelings more," Richie said cryptically. "Alright, Eddie-spaghetti, I think we've found all we're going to here. Let's head back to Mike's serial killer lair."

Eddie nodded with relief, the prospect of returning to the sunlight immediately winning over any curiosity he had about Richie's first statement.

They both turned and headed outside, unaware that they were being watched from the not-too-distant shadows of the sewer. If either of them had thought to glance back, even just once, they may have seen the dark shape of a figure staring after them in brooding silence, the realisation of being forgotten beginning to make its ugly truth known.

* * *

 _So they were alive, after all. It had all been a horrible prank played on him by Pennywise, watching them die again and again until he cried and begged for it to stop, for the torture to be inflicted on him instead. But then he'd come to that realisation himself eventually, hadn't he, that something wasn't quite right in the nightmarish prison the clown had built for him. And still, as bad as everything Pennywise had done to him had been, it was much easier than watching the people he loved most struck down in the worst ways. Even if they weren't real._

 _And yet... his friends, his allies, those he thought he could trust most in the world - they had forgotten all about him? They had left him behind and moved on with their lives, grown up, got older, never sparing a thought for the torture and pain he'd been subjected to at the hands of Pennywise... Had he placed his faith in the wrong bunch of losers after all? What was for them a foggy distant past was for him a brutal present, the echoes of their played-out deaths still fresh in his mind. It didn't seem so long ago that the seven of them were down in the cistern, watching Georgie's body float down from above. Realising that the quest had not been in vain after all, even though he'd begun to come to terms with the fact that Georgie was gone. Yes, it was still almost as vivid as this painful reality, where everything seemed too bright and too harsh to his shadowed eyes._

 _As he stared after who he easily recognised as Eddie and Richie, though so much older than he'd last seen them, he felt the flicker of a distant rage ignite within his chest as the pain of being left behind, in both space and time, began to consume him, as a faint darkness inside him grew that at once both scared and empowered him._

 _And closer than the shadow of Bill Denbrough could have known, the Turtle despaired._

* * *

George was silent as they walked away from the Neibolt house, turning the paper boat over in his hands as Beverly watched helplessly through sideways glances, not knowing what to say. His eyes were clouded, and his thoughts were clearly far away even though his legs kept him walking alongside her.

Here it was, the boat that had led to George's abduction by the clown and months-long disappearance, worn and aged but still perfectly in tact. What did it mean that Pennywise has left it for them? Another of his tricks to be sure, but this one seemed to have hit George particularly hard.

"George," Bev pressed gently. "Are you okay?"

He didn't respond, walking slowly while still staring down at the boat in his hands. Finally, after several moments, he spoke.

"This boat..." He didn't lift his eyes from it. "It was the beginning of everything."

Somewhere in the back of his mind, unbeknownst to Bev, a little voice whispered: _she, Georgie, we call boats she_.

His vague words made her frown, not quite understanding what he meant. The boat was indeed what had led to George's disappearance, and based on what they knew, he had been the first to be taken by Pennywise that fall. But the words carried more weight than that, as if there were something more behind them. Based on the wavering confusion on George's face, she didn't think he had a very good idea of what the words meant either.

George, meanwhile, was caught in his memories, realising that there was a thick fog around his brain when it came to _that day_ , that there was a pain in his chest he couldn't quite manifest, the feeling of a great loss which he had carried with him all his life. This boat was somehow a tangible metaphor for that loss, something which in the past he'd dismissed as the loss of his arm. Losing a part of him in such a way had always seemed so important. And yet now, seeing and holding the boat again and feeling the warm feelings rush through him at the sight of the boat's scraggly name, he knew it was more than that.

In an instant, he knew where he had to go.

"Sorry Bev," he said apologetically, turning away from her and changing the direction he was heading in. "I need to do something."

She followed after him, protesting.

"George, wait, what is it?" she said. "Can't we go together?"

"No, this is something I have to do myself," he said, finally looking up from the boat and meeting her blue eyes. "I'm sorry... I'll be back at the hotel soon. Tell the others, and don't worry, it'll be fine."

She frowned again, but saw the seriousness on his face and knew it was best to leave him be. If she stayed, she would only be getting in the way of something important, she could tell.

"Okay," she said reluctantly. "Be safe."

"You too," he said, turning and continuing down the road. He knew exactly where he needed to go, even if he didn't quite know why.

He was going _home_.

* * *

Ben and Stan were the first to arrive back at the hotel, the former clutching two fat yearbooks to his chest in an echo of his younger self who'd almost always been carrying around a couple of books from Derry Public Library. They found Mike in the hotel's restaurant, looking a little less pale while munching absently on a sandwich. They joined him and ordered for themselves, an order which came relatively quickly since it was already quite late for lunch and there was no one else around.

Mike, of course, was anxious to get back to the room, but too polite to urge them to hurry, so he just sat at the table watching them eat with a nervous look, which made the whole situation that much more awkward. Ben and Stan readily picked up on the not-so-subtle vibes from Mike and scoffed down the rest of their food.

They were joined by Eddie and Richie in the hallway, as they made their way back to the conference room. Richie seemed keen to share something they had found, but Mike shook his head quickly and gestured in the direction of the conference room. Keeping things under the radar was high on his agenda, and it would not be good to have random people overhear their conversation. Derry locals or not, it was sure to draw unwanted attention. Richie pouted, but accepted his reasoning.

There was the obvious absence of Beverly and George, and Mike reassured them that they would probably be along shortly. But the unspoken truth that the two had arguably gone to the most dangerous location of all remained in the air between them.

The five of them reached the conference door, and Mike suddenly stopped, face filled with worry.

"What, Mike?" Eddie asked. He followed Mike's gaze and saw what had made him stop so suddenly: the door which he had so carefully locked and double-checked was very slightly ajar.

"There's no way I left it like that," Mike said in a hushed voice. "I checked..."

There was a long silence during which none of them dared move, because the first and most obvious thought that had occurred simultaneously to all of them was that there was a particular entity dressed in a clown suit waiting for then on the other side. Mike brought a finger to his lips, and edged silently forward towards the door, reaching out with a slightly trembling hand towards the handle. His movements seemed to take an age to the other four, who watched tensely. Was it even possible to sneak up on Pennywise?

"Well, are you coming in already?" prompted an impatient female voice.

They all started, shocked at a voice that definitely did not belong to Pennywise... unless he was hiding in the guise of another.

Mike pushed the door open, revealing a woman standing in front of his collection, one hand on her hip. She had dark brown hair, pulled back in a messy ponytail, and was dressed casually in jeans and a red hoodie. If he has to guess, Mike would have said she was partly of European descent, maybe Spanish or Italian, though not recently as her accent was flawlessly American. She cocked an eyebrow at them, her face lined with amusement. The mirth didn't quite reach her eyes though, which were hardened with emotions Mike couldn't really place.

"Well," said Richie, always the first to break an awkward silence. "Who the fuck are you?"

This caused her to laugh, shaking her head.

"You definitely live up to expectation, Richie Tozier," she said. Richie just stared back at her in a stunned silence, dumbfounded that she knew his name. He could tell it wasn't because she was a fan of his LA talk show. Mike was suddenly more on edge, wondering if this actually was a new game being played on them by Pennywise, who certainly knew their names.

"Oh, I know all of you," she clarified, seeing the look on his face. "I did my research."

"You... did?" Mike repeated, glancing back at the door that he _knew_ he locked before going to get food. Clearly, whoever this person was, she had broken into the room. Which made her potentially dangerous.

"But _really_ , who are you?" Stan asked, looking uncomfortable. "And why are you here?"

"Also - this is just some history we've been looking into," Eddie added hastily, waving at the documents behind her. "Nothing serious, you know."

She paused, her mouth drawn in a line as she seemed to contemplate what to say. Finally, she approached Mike, the closest to her, and held her hand out.

"Andi," she said simply. "Nice to meet you."

Mike grasped her hand and shook, warily.

"Michael Hanlon," he said, "but I guess you already know that." The slight shrug of her shoulders indicated he was correct.

"Let's get one thing clear," she said, stepping back from Mike and addressing all of them. "I know about the clown."

Her words hung in the room as the Losers stared back at this stranger who was somehow completely clued in to their plight. Should they play along, or was it safest to deny the existence of the clown? Hadn't they had a conversation way back when, trying to decide who they could trust with their stories of monsters in the darkness, ruling out the police, their parents, and even the other kids for some inexplicable reason none of them could put into words?

If anyone else had known about the clown then, they hadn't been talking about it. Or, the darker truth: they hadn't lived to tell the tale.

"Clown?" Eddie squeaked, seemingly coming down on the side of playing dumb.

Her eyes narrowed.

"Yes, _clown_ ," she said, sounding a bit exasperated. "You know, the messed-up fucker who likes eating children?"

Mike wasn't sure what it was about her, but he decided that it was best to just come clean and find out what she knew. And more importantly, how she knew it.

"Okay, let's put our cards on the table," he said, holding his hand up in a gesture of surrender. He indicated the other four standing near him. "They came here to Derry, at my request, to help me stop Pennywise. What about you?"

"I came here to destroy that soul-sucking dirtbag for good," she said simply. And she said it in such a matter-of-fact tone that it almost sounded believable. Ben found himself wanting to believe it, with all his heart - here was someone who seemed to know what they were doing, and maybe even knew how to stop Pennywise? Things had appeared rather hopeless after he and Stan visited the library, returning to the hotel with only a couple of yearbooks and a seeming dead-end. But now, he found himself wondering if maybe they could pull it off after all.

"So, you got a plan?" Richie challenged, arms crossed.

"Not yet," she said. "But I will. And I want to know what you know."

"Hang on, but how do you even know about the clown?" Stan said, always the voice of reason, shaking his head. "Why should we trust you?"

She paused again, with the same look of weighing up options on her face.

"My uncle... he was targeted by Pennywise in the 1950s," she said finally, and Mike believed she was telling the truth. Not the whole truth, but the part she was willing to reveal to them. In all his time chatting to the residents of Derry trying to uncover as much as he could about the town's dark past, he'd become pretty good at reading people. But as for how much they could trust her... that wasn't yet clear to him.

"Did he-" Ben hesitated.

"No," she said. "Pennywise didn't get him. But he took one of his best friends. And my uncle never forgot how close he had come to becoming another of Derry's missing kids. So when I was a kid, he would warn me all the time to not play after dark and to avoid being alone. Everyone else in this god-forsaken town forgets... but he didn't. "

"Is he still around?" Mike asked, wondering if her grandfather might be a good source of information about Pennywise. She looked to be mid to late twenties, so it wasn't impossible.

"No," she said softly. "He died in some backwater in Indiana when I was a teenager..."

"Sorry," Mike apologised, feeling bad for letting his desire for knowledge dredge up bad memories. She wasn't going to elaborate, but it was clear it had affected her.

"It's fine," she said, the softness in her voice gone. "Look, will you tell me what you know or not? I think we can help each other."

"You seem to know a lot about us already," Stan pointed out.

"Yeah," she acknowledged. "I'm a private investigator by trade, and I set up notifications a while ago for anything suspicious concerning Derry. When I realised the clown had surfaced again, I started gathering intel on the last time he'd terrorised Derry. Your names, all of you... you stick out. The losers of Derry way back when, somehow the biggest successes in whatever field you chose to pursue, and arguably the prime targets of that Bowers kid. A family rivalry that led to dead chickens and a murdered dog, or bullying resulting in a broken arm and a trip to the hospital, for example..."

She looked pointedly at Mike and Eddie.

"Actually, my arm was Pennywise but we blamed it on Bowers," Eddie offered helpfully.

"Shut up, Eddie," Richie rolled his eyes.

"And Bowers himself," Andi continued. "Bowers, who mysteriously vanished that summer never to be seen again, his friends found dead in his car and his father a bloody mess in their family house. The papers pinned it on him, claiming that the murders of all those kids that year had driven him mad and so he'd taken his own life, but that never sat right with me. I was only a little kid at the time, so I never understood what had happened until later, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that there was more to the story than the papers wanted people to believe."

She grimaced.

"The worst part is, I don't even think the people who wrote the papers knew they were hiding the truth. I think they truly believed the trash they wrote, some epic form of denial. This town is really good at that. Anyway, I do mean it when I say I want to kill it. That clown needs to let Derry go... he's done too much damage."

"Say we believe you," Richie said. "Then what? We tell you info and you go off like a dragon slayer and bring back the clown's head? Are you the hero we deserve?"

"Maybe," she said without jest. "Provided you don't get in my way."

"I don't think Pennywise is something you can just cut the head off of," Ben said. "We got close last time, but none of us can remember how."

"Actually, I think I can help you with that," she said brightly. "I trained in memory retrieval and the cognitive interview process, it helps a lot with getting information from witnesses. People always know a lot more than they think. And if your memories help make it clearer how to kill the clown, or whatever _it_ is, then we both win."

A flicker of hope filled Mike's chest, for the first time in a while. If they could get back their memories of the lost time, shrouded by Pennywise's magic, that would almost certainly reveal clues to how they might defeat him. The motivations and true story of this girl, Andi, if that was really her name at all, were still unclear, but if she could do what she said she could...

"Deal," Mike said, to the surprise of everyone around him.

"Wait, Mike, what?" Richie blinked.

"We don't even know who she is," hissed Stan at him under his breath.

"I'm right here, I can hear you," Andi said to Stan. "I told you why I'm here. That's the truth."

Mike looked at her, and the expression on her face. He knew, and probably the others did too, that there was more to her story than what she was revealing to them. But at the same time, he believed she did want to kill the clown, and that she could be a useful ally.

"We won't do anything till Beverly and George get back," he said, more for the benefit of the others than for Andi. "In the meantime, we can tell you what we know, and you do the same. It might help fill in some gaps for all of us."

She nodded, meeting his eyes. He knew this decision didn't really sit right with Richie or Stan, but right now, having spent the entire morning going in circles and getting nowhere, this seemed like a big leap forward.

Maybe the feat they had assigned themselves wasn't so insurmountable after all.

Maybe they could win.

* * *

George stood outside the house he had called home as a child, still holding the paper boat, filled with a surreal feeling of _finally_ coming home even though he'd done that years ago. Without the boat though, and without his right arm, and without something much more important that he still couldn't figure out.

There was a black Corolla in the driveway, indicating someone was at home. Suddenly nervous, despite the certainty with which he had headed there, he approached the door trying to come up with what to say. He didn't know how to explain why he needed to be here to whoever answered the door, he didn't even understand it himself. When he reached the door, he hesitated, but finally knocked as loudly as he dared. Which wasn't really that loudly, if he was being honest.

A few moments passed before he heard light footsteps approach, and then the door swung open to reveal a young boy, maybe around eight years old, with an inquisitive look on his face. His strawberry-blond hair hung in a mop around his head, and he was dressed in clothes much more meant for summer than for the cooler weather of fall.

"Who is it, Sean?" called a woman's voice from further in the house.

"Dunno," the boy called back, shrugging at George and walking off. A woman carrying a half-asleep baby emerged from the back, looking surprised to have a visitor at this point in the afternoon.

"Can I help you?" she said, shifting the baby, which seemed placid enough in her arms.

"Uh..." George began, trying to think of a good story but ending up inevitably at the truth. Or part of it, anyway. "Actually... it's weird but, I used to live here with my family a long time ago."

"Oh?" she said, tilting her head as she examined him.

"I'm back in Derry visiting friends, and I got really curious about the old place," he said, somewhat truthfully. "I know it's strange but-"

"Do I know you from somewhere?" she interrupted. "I feel like I've seen you on something... something about science...?"

George's cheeks flushed red.

"Oh, heh, yeah," he admitted, never really knowing what to say in these circumstances. "I was a guest star on Mythbusters for a few episodes a while ago..."

Honestly, he was impressed this lady even remembered that. He only remembered feeling overwhelmed and a little awkward, as he tried his best to contribute useful science input to the few episodes he had been cast for. He couldn't even remember now how he'd gotten involved with it, probably the faculty had recommended him and he found himself unable to say no since it was considered such a privilege to be chosen, even though being in the spotlight had never been his thing.

"That's so cool!" exclaimed another boy, who'd just come down the stairs. He was older than the first boy, Sean, but not much. They looked very similar, but the older boy's hair was darker. "I love Mythbusters!"

"Please, come in," the woman said, opening the door. "I'm Margaret, and that's Alex. You used to live here?"

"Yeah, we moved out in the mid-nineties or so," he said. "But I grew up here."

"That's nice that you've come back to see friends," she said distractedly, as the baby stirred in her arms. "Is it what you remembered?"

 _I really don't know because I can't remember_ , he thought but didn't say.

"Some parts," he said. "I haven't been back for so long and my memory isn't as good as it used to be."

That caused her to laugh.

"You can't be much more than 30, and you're already complaining about your memory? Come back to me when you hit 40, hun."

He smiled sheepishly, enjoying a little just how normal this household seemed to be. It was at sharp contrast to what he did remember of his childhood, at least the part that came after Pennywise. His parents always seemed so worried and sad, and there was no warmth in the house like he remembered when he was younger. Afterwards... it was cold and almost empty here.

"Do you want a drink or anything?" she asked, walking towards the kitchen. He followed, but didn't really feel like imposing too much on her hospitality. He tried to hide the boat under his arm, as he had no way of explaining it without sounding crazy. If she had noticed it already, Margaret had politely decided to play dumb.

"I'm okay, thank you," he said, his eyes drawn to the back porch. He remembered sprawling there in the summer, when it was too hot to do anything except minimise body movement in an attempt to stay cool. This place... there were so many memories here. And yet they all felt incomplete, like he was missing something important about them.

"Actually, could I see one of the rooms?" he asked, hoping it didn't sound too weird. "It was... my bedroom back then."

He felt bad lying to her, but he couldn't think of any good reason for why he needed to see what had been the spare room, where his mother would sometimes sit and sew. Really, it should have meant nothing more to him than that and yet somehow it did, he knew that he had waved to someone up in this window. His mother, maybe? If he saw the room, maybe he would understand better what it meant.

The faintest trace of concern passed across Margaret's face, and in that microsecond he felt all the anxiety of being labelled crazy, and feared she would kick him out of the house. But then she just smiled.

"Sure, it's Alex's room now. You know the way, I'll bet," she said. "Alex honey, your room isn't too much of a wreck is it?"

"No, Mum," came a drawl from the living room, and George could hear in the background the sounds of some kind of video game.

"Go ahead then, uh-"

With another flush, he realised he hadn't actually introduced himself.

"Sorry, George," he said quickly. "George Denbrough."

He excused himself, still hiding the boat from her view as much as possible, and headed upstairs to the room. A lot had changed in the house, small things but still noticeable. There was a carpet liner on the stairs that never used to be there, and the walls had been given a fresh coat of paint in the not-too-distant past. Places where his family photos had once hung along the stairs were now empty, and even the pin-holes that had marked their presence had been filled in and painted over.

He found his way to the room which faced the driveway, and pushed open the half-closed door gently to reveal a room filled with all the things you'd expect for a 10 year old just learning about all the cool things the world had to offer. A self-painted solar system model made out of foam balls hanging from the ceiling with Blu-Tack, a collection of small models of exotic animals on the window sill, kids books about ancient history and the building of the Pyramids and the first explorers strewn across the desk. The bed was covered with a quilt featuring some sort of popular cartoon characters, George wasn't quite sure which but he vaguely recognised the summer-camp style artwork and the title painted on the wooden sign at the bottom which read "Gravity Falls".

But despite all this, despite everything that clearly marked the room now as belonging to a 10-year-old boy named Alex, he had the strong feeling it had once belonged to another. Had he remembered so badly, and this was actually his room from all those years ago? Being back here, he certainly felt like he had spent a lot of time in the room, more than he'd realised before. And although it wasn't, _of course it wasn't_ , how could that be physically possible - but somehow the paper boat felt slightly warm in his hands, as if it had been freshly waxed. In that moment he knew for certain that this boat, the boat which clearly was so important to the past that he was trying to remember, had been folded in this exact room, had been painted and waxed and marked _S.S. Georgie_ right here.

 _We call boats she._

And the ache in his heart that he'd always felt in the years after his return from the sewer, the feeling and sense of a great loss, was so strongly amplified in this room that it burned within his chest, made his head pound with a sudden intensity, and he stumbled to the edge of the bed to sit there, his vision suddenly a little hazy. He felt like he was so close to remembering, that the memories which Pennywise had hidden from him were on the verge of spilling over and perhaps consuming him in all their power and pain. For he knew, certainly, they were painful. And what hurt even more was the feeling of knowing the memories were there, of knowing they were important and just on the edge of his brain, and yet still being unable to retrieve them.

He breathed in deeply, and heavily, not liking the way his breath shuddered.

"Are you okay?" Margaret's voice pierced his thoughts. The baby was no longer in her arms, presumably put to bed in a cot somewhere. The concern which had flickered across her face only briefly before was now etched there, but it seemed less concern that he was crazy and more that he was maybe fundamentally not okay and needed help. Which wasn't so far from the truth, really.

"Yes, sorry," he said, running a hand absently through his hair. "Just a lot of memories being here, you know."

That particular lie felt incredibly ironic, since it was not the memories which affected him but the _lack_ of them. He almost laughed at the thought but knew that would put him back on track to being classified as crazy.

He stood up, with a forced smile.

"Thanks for letting me come here, I know it's a bit odd," he said. "But I just had this strong feeling of needing to see the place again."

"I understand," she said, smiling back. "Nostalgia hits you hard sometimes."

He nodded, and she turned back to lead him to the front door. He followed, but as he reached the door, he suddenly had the compulsion to turn around, and in a flash that wasn't real ( _but boy did it feel real_ ), he was no longer looking at Alex's room but instead a different one, a _familiar_ one, a room lined with posters from famous 1980s movies and a spinning globe next to a green plastic dinosaur on the desk and faded tartan wallpaper and ironically a similar kind of terribly-constructed model solar system, and on the desk a half-opened rectangle of Gulf Wax.

He blinked, his vision swimming again, and it was gone. Alex's room returned. He shook his head a little, as if to clear it, and then turned back to follow Margaret to the door. She held it open for him.

"Thanks again," he said. "It's super nice of you to humour me."

"Well, you can do one favour for me," she winked, nodding at Alex in the living room, who bashfully came forward with a Mythbusters book.

"Could you sign my book, mister?" he said shyly. George was taken aback (he'd really only ever been a tangential component of the show), but flattered all the same.

"Sure," he smiled. He took the pen from Alex, knelt down and opened the book to the inside cover, scrawling a quick message and signing it at the bottom.

 _To Alex,  
_ _Always follow your curiosity, you never know what cool places it will take you!  
_ _All the best,  
_ _George Denbrough_

He handed it back and Alex beamed at him, running upstairs to return the book to its usual home on his bookshelf, but with more of a pride of place than ever before. The signed book was now infinitely more special than the others.

"Thanks, George," Margaret said warmly. "Feel free to drop by again while you're in town. I hope your reunion with your friends goes well."

"Thanks." He turned from the house.

"It floats." The statement was half a question. He turned back in confusion, suddenly unnerved. But her eyes were on the boat in his hand. She had probably seen it from the beginning, but only now chose to acknowledge it.

"Oh," he said, lifting it. "Yes, it does."

"It looks old. Did one of your friends keep it for you?"

 _One of my friends_. George laughed in his mind at the thought of who had been keeping the boat for him.

"Yeah," he lied again.

"Well, there's a nice river by the canal you could float it on, see if she still goes," Margaret smiled.

"She?" George felt cold inside.

"Yeah, sure, you know people refer to boats as a she, right?"

"Oh, I guess..." He smiled weakly and turned away again. "See you around, Margaret."

She watched him go, and then when he was at the end of the driveway, he heard the door close softly. And once more, he turned back to look at the house he had called home, at the porch and the windows and the roof which hadn't changed as much as he'd expected, somehow.

But then his heart stopped.

In the window of the "spare" room, the room which somehow was connected to the boat, and to his lost memories, he saw a familiar figure standing, watching him with mocking silver eyes. Orange pom poms in a line down the chest of an old faded jester suit, the same colour as the vibrant orange hair. Blood-red lips twisted in a grin, which widened as George's blood ran cold.

Pennywise raised one hand and waved slowly, merrily. He felt goosebumps raise on his arms, even though the sun was shining on him. The clown somehow embodied pure terror, and he could not help but feel afraid as he looked up at the entity which had tortured them for so long. Especially since he knew the clown wasn't really there - couldn't be - that no one else but him could see Pennywise... the worst kind of monster in the night.

With a shiver, he turned from the house again, and this time he did not look back.


	11. Chapter 11

_Note: Ummm... hello world. It's been a while. I am very sorry for how long it has taken me to update this story! I've had this chapter partly or mostly written for a long time, but a combination of crazy work life, summer holidays and a bit of writer's block combined to result in me continuing to put off finishing it. I did in the meantime finish the book, though - success! Thank you to everyone who reviewed the last chapter, I really appreciate it and seeing your comments was a continuing reminder to me to finish the chapter! Shout-out to Guest for noting one of my typos, oops! And special thanks to those who posted months after my last update, thanks for not giving up on this fic :) I hope to be able to update much sooner with the next chapter, will do my best - lots of things to come for the gang of Losers! Hope you like this chapter, and let me know your thoughts! (and sorry again, I don't honestly know how it is October, like what even happened to the middle of the year...) :o_

* * *

 _"There's a hole in my soul  
_ _I can't fill it, I can't fill it  
_ _There's a hole in my soul  
_ _Can you fill it? Can you fill it?"  
_ \- Flaws, Bastille

* * *

 _It was a sunny afternoon, the leftover from what had evidently been a day of clear and beautiful weather. He was standing on the grounds of his family farm, the green hill sloping away towards the pastures in front of him. That seemed strange to him, since he hadn't been back there for so long... but the warmth on his skin comforted him and his initial concern faded away as his eyes scanned around. They rested on his old family house, the memories of his childhood washing through his mind._

 _Then his stomach dropped._

 _He saw his beloved dog, Mr Chips, bounding across the grass from the house, towards him. Despite himself, he raised his hands in a welcoming gesture, about to call his name, but the ghost of his childhood friend ran past him, tail wagging, towards..._

 _... towards the Bowers farm boundary._

 _Why did they ever let Mr Chips roam so freely, knowing they had enemies so very close?_

 _There, of course, was the demon in a mullet Henry Bowers, just as he was back then, complete with singlet top and faded jeans, every bit the 1980s hoon, beckoning and calling to Mr Chips with all the falsified warmness of a friend. But his eyes, oh, those eyes gave it all away. They were the emptiest blue Mike had ever seen, a hollow washed out vacant kind of blue. Like the lights were on, but the boy once known as Henry wasn't home. And yet Mr Chips went, too trusting and believing to sense the truth._

 _A choked cry died in Mike's throat as he realised that it was futile and he was doomed to watch this play out: Henry offering the poisoned meat to Mr Chips, who immediately starting munching it with an enthusiastically wagging tail, the wag slowing as the dog tasted something off in the food, the reassurance from Henry encouraging him to keep eating, the wavering stance of the young Labrador as the poison began to kick in, as Henry tied Mr Chips to a tree to stop him running back home._

 _Hot tears stung Mike's eyes as a wound that he hadn't opened in years was torn apart in front of him cruelly, as Mr Chips collapsed, panting, on the grass with feeble whimpers, the tail still wagging ever so faintly at what he thought was his friend. But why wasn't the friend helping him? Why was the friend just watching?_

 _The sky darkened, and in a matter of seconds it had changed from a sunny afternoon to the heavy weight of an impending storm, everything now in shades of muted grey. And at that moment, Mike's time as a bystander ended, and Henry looked directly at him with the same empty expression. Mike sensed the threat, and tried to back away, but his legs wouldn't cooperate with him._

 _Henry stood, almost as tall as him even as a teenager, and made a sharp movement with his right hand. Mike saw the switch blade glint as Henry opened it, the boy grinning vacantly as he advanced towards Mike. Lightning flashed, and Henry was suddenly unspeakably closer. Another flash, and he was right in front of Mike. The switchblade flashed, and Mike cried out as the teenage Henry embedded it in his stomach, twisting with a triumphant gleam in his empty eyes._

 _Mike fell to his knees, pain flooding through him mixed with the nausea and regret for not protecting Mr Chips, for not being there with him when he passed in pain and with only a heartless savage for company. His vision was blurring, as his hands grasped at the switchblade, coughing up specks of blood which landed at Henry's feet. Henry laughed, an echoing sound that was laced with not just his own laugh, but the high-pitched laughter of Pennywise and the eerie watery giggles of monstrous children, the ghosts of those lost in the depths of the sewers._

 _In his swimming vision, Mike glimpsed a figure near the tree, standing next to the small body of Mr Chips. A thin shape, ragged hair, and torn clothes, with a flash of green eyes as the lightning cracked around them._

" _Help-" Mike gasped, gesturing at the figure. The face was shadowed but in the flash of the lightning he could make out details. The person was young, and familiar somehow. He reminded Mike of someone he knew, or someone that he used to know... and the expression on his face was such a strange mix of emotions... despair, anger, fear... and a glimpse of hurt..._

 _Who was this person?_

 _He didn't have time to dwell more, because Henry had knelt down and wrenched the switchblade from his stomach, causing him to cry in agony, and then the lightning flashed again and the blade came down towards him._

 _He screamed._

* * *

Mike lunged up from the chair, the remains of a cry dying on his lips as he looked around at the shocked faces of the others.

"You alright, man?" Ben asked, clapping him on the shoulder. "You screamed like you were being murdered."

"I was..." Mike mumbled, absently. Already the details were fading from his adrenaline-pumped mind, his heart rate slowing. He wasn't the slightest bit aware of Andi's speculative eyes fixed on him. He'd just seen Henry Bowers in his nightmare and it had felt so real, but there had been someone else there, hadn't there, watching... But not Pennywise...

Mike looked around the room. Everyone was milling around, looking a bit anxious. He supposed his outburst hadn't helped with that. The last thing he remembered was that they had decided to wait for George and Beverly to return, and then Andi was going to try and help them remember more about their lost childhood memories. There was still no sign of either of them, so Mike supposed it hadn't been that long since he drifted off while sitting in the rather comfortable armchair. Maybe fifteen minutes, the time during which he'd be thrown unwillingly into that awful time and place. The loss of Mr Chips still hurt deeply after all these years, and if he came face to face with Henry now, as an adult, he wasn't sure what he would do. Probably get his ass kicked, realistically.

He'd grown up to become nothing more than a taller, nerdier version of his kid self, and when he saw the kids of this era running around with their gadgets and their fashion-savvy attire, he figured he would have done just about the same in their generation. Except with more cyber bullying, maybe. That seemed to play out with surprising and unfortunate regularity in Derry, he'd observed from his post in the library, and he assumed the same for elsewhere in the world. But then, wasn't Derry always the worse example set for the rest of the world? Things just seemed to go _wrong_ more often here. Like they lived in a naturally dark corner of the world.

"What were you dreaming about?" Andi asked finally, the only ignorant non-Loser who, unlike the others, wasn't aware that it would be something traumatising drawn from their childhood. Like all their dreams, or rather nightmares, had been lately, because living the nightmare of Pennywise being back wasn't enough apparently.

"Mr Chips," Mike replied simply, his mouth drawn. He knew she would make the connection, since she already knew about what Henry had done. And he realised the reason she knew was his fault, because despite his father's weary contradictions, he'd insisted on going to the police about Mr Chips. Without evidence, they weren't able to do anything though, and so they'd simply made a record of his accusation and said to come back if they found evidence. Of course, the police were just as scared as anyone else of the Bowers family. And after the chickens... the newest staff of the police were hardly looking for any more fights like that.

"That fucking bastard," Richie contributed sympathetically. "I can't believe he did that to your dog. That guy was messed up to the extreme."

"No kidding," Ben said, his eyes dropping to the scars hidden underneath his shirt. The scars he'd gotten from Henry weren't just physical, and the mental ones were arguably worse. But Henry had also played a key role in his utter hatred of himself as a teenager, and so, in a weird way, in his motivation to finally be more than the fat kid who was always such an easy target for bullies.

The door opened cautiously, and a familiar face with wavy red hair appeared. Ben's stomach dropped. She always had that effect on him, even after all this time. But her heart was always... someone else's... he frowned at the repeated and confusing train of thought. For a brief moment he'd felt that same lovesick feeling that burned in his chest during his time in Derry, but he'd been somehow watching her with someone else. Maybe that was important... but then his eyes were drawn to Beverly again and he lost the train of thought.

"Bev, finally!" Richie exclaimed. She entered, looking a bit sheepish, and closed the door behind her. Instantly they all realised the missing party from her return.

"Where's George?" asked Eddie, looking confused and a little panicked.

"Yeah, about that..." she began. "Look, I know it was a bad idea and I didn't want to... but we split up on the way back from the Neibolt house. He said he had something he needed to do and I couldn't stop him, and he seemed so sure that I shouldn't go with him..."

"Where did he go?" Stan looked maybe the most worried of all of them, and was rubbing absently on his wrist through the cuffs of his sweater.

"He wouldn't say," Bev said glumly. "I thought about following him, even started to... but then I felt guilty and so I came back here instead."

Her gaze fell for the first time on Andi, and her eyebrows raised. If she hadn't been so distracted by the absence of George, and her decision to let him go, she would have noticed the vibe in the room was different right away. It was the same sense of Otherness that they'd once felt as children, the unspoken sense that allowed them to immediately distinguish one of _Them_ from someone who was not part of their circle, who couldn't be because of some unseen force they could only play along to the tune of. The sense that allowed them to welcome Mike without question, to make it Lucky Seven.

 _Seven?_ Bev internally questioned herself. No, George hadn't been with them then, he was missing for most of the summer until their showdown with Pennywise. They were six. But Lucky Six didn't quite have the same ring to it, did it...?

"Hi, I'm Andi," the dark-haired girl said, offering her hand to Bev. Her expression faltered a little when Bev just stared at her wordlessly, and she threw a look sideways to Mike for help with Beverly.

"She knows about Pennywise," he said by way of explanation. Bev looked even more confused. But she seemed to snap out of her daze and tentatively shook Andi's hand.

"Beverly Marsh," she said simply, not even bothering to state her legal name. She didn't feel like that person anymore, anyway. Mike half-expected Andi to quip something she mysteriously knew about Bev, but she was silent. Maybe she sensed her knowledge would be treated with suspicion in the case of Beverly, who had generally been slow to trust people.

"What's your connection to all this?" Bev asked, sounding a little wary in any case. "It's a bit convenient of you to show up here the same time as us."

"It's not a coincidence," Andi admitted. "I realised you were all gathering, thanks to a few calls I made or vacation replies to emails I'd sent, and I had already realised for some months that Pennywise was back. You all left quite an electronic trail leading to the Derry Inn... so here I am. I want to help."

"And you know about the clown... _how_ exactly?" Bev's eyes were still a little narrowed, but she seemed less hostile towards Andi than when she'd entered.

"My uncle faced off against him as a kid and warned me," she echoed her story from earlier, and still Mike had the same feeling that there was more to it than that. But with time, maybe she would be more open about that part. He wondered if the others had the same sense of obscuration when it came to Andi's reason for being there, but then they hadn't spent years like he had talking to the residents of Derry trying to separate truth from reality. And in the end what he'd come to realise from all that was that there was no truth at the best of times, just fragments of evidence scraped from the memories of people who didn't always remember what had happened so clearly to begin with. Or didn't want to remember.

But wherever there was tragedy in Derry, the bloody handprint of Pennywise was never too far to be found.

"Why wait till now to approach us? You knew about this all along?" Bev didn't seem entirely convinced by Andi's answer, unsurprisingly. She did have a good instinct for people, Mike had always known this. It seemed Beverly also sensed there was more to Andi than she was letting on.

"I'm not an idiot," Andi said simply. "I wasn't about to try and take on Pennywise by myself. It's not just kids that get taken by the clown, and going in by yourself is about the dumbest thing you can do."

"Speaking of that, should we be worried about George?" Stan prompted. "Was he..."

"No, this wasn't a vengeance mission or anything like that," Bev said quickly. "It was more like he had thought of something that might trigger some memories about what we've forgotten. We did see Pennywise in the Neibolt house, though."

" _What_?!" Ben exclaimed, jumping to his feet.

"Don't you think you should have led with that maybe?" Richie made a face.

"What happened?" Mike asked urgently, suddenly tense again.

"Well... the ghost of Henry Bowers made an appearance," Bev said, shuddering a little at the memory of the swampy corpse lurching towards them. "Then the clown..."

"The clown?" Eddie half-squeaked.

"Yeah... but something weird happened," she recalled, her face confused. "It was like someone, or _something_ , else was there, Pennywise was talking to it but we couldn't see anything. He got really angry about it... and then he was gone. But something was left behind, by the clown or not I don't know. It was Georgie's boat."

There was a short silence as they all reflected on what that meant, for the boat which led George into the sewers all those years ago to resurface now. Like the never-ending cycle was looping back on itself, and they were being drawn into something they maybe had no chance of winning to begin with. For all the infinite possibilities of ways it could play out, maybe it was the cycle that would win in the end, and they were just pawns from the start.

"Oh!" Richie exclaimed suddenly, nudging Eddie who was standing next to him. "We found something too. Mike here wouldn't let me show it and I forgot about it until now."

He got his phone out and tapped his fingers against the screen, calling up the last photo he'd taken of the carving in the tree. The others clustered around the screen, and Richie found himself randomly thinking it was good he upgraded to the largest screen real estate available, even if it felt sometimes like he was carrying a tablet in his pocket.

"We carved that?" Mike immediately asked, seeming a bit dazed. "Why don't I remember it?"

"It's foggy for us too," Eddie said. "But look at this: who is WD?"

His finger pointed at the initials, and glanced at the faces of the other Losers. It wasn't ringing a bell with any of them, that much was clear. Bev reached towards the screen and made an odd gesture, as if imagining the wood underneath her fingers. There was a bit of a forlorn look in her eyes, but no sign of recognition.

"You're saying there was one of your group with the initials WD, and none of you can remember who?" Andi asked, arms crossed. "Why would the clown keep that from you? Where did the person go?"

She looked around only to see many blank faces staring back at her. She sighed, realising her work was pretty cut out for her with all of them still well under the shroud of Pennywise's magic. It reminded her of what her uncle used to say about the town of Derry: sometimes the clown's magic changed people, so that when something bad happened they were completely oblivious. It was a dark magic, that was for sure, to make people look the other way or even participate in the worst acts but then act as if they never happened. That dazed part of Derry - she saw it looking back at her from the eyes of the Losers. Whatever they had forgotten, the clown was using a ton of magic to keep it that way. She only hoped it would make Pennywise weaker somehow in the long run.

"Okay," Andi said finally. "We might as well try some memory recollection techniques then, since clearly you guys are all missing something."

"No kidding," Eddie said glumly. "Whatever it is, I know I feel crappy about it. Almost like I did something wrong, but that's just weird isn't it?"

Richie shrugged helplessly back at him.

They followed her directions to find a seat or comfortable position around the room. Mike chose to shift to the floor, perhaps in a not-so-shielded attempt to avoid falling asleep again. He was still a bit pale, sitting cross-legged against the wooden panelling near the door. Bev chose to sit on the bay window seat, her gaze somewhat worried as it flicked out the window. Ben, to no one's surprise, sat on the chair near her almost protectively. Richie smugly took Mike's vacated chair, while Eddie took the other. Stan sat on a rickety stool near the bookshelf, but seemed fairly comfortable despite it. His eyes were a bit distracted though, looking at the door expectantly.

Mike watched Andi's eyes flick over them all, feeling like he could see the wheels turning in her head. It seemed like she was deciding what the best approach was for them, drawing from probably several techniques for jogging memory. But how often had she dealt with suppressed childhood memories of facing off against a demonic clown? He knew the answer to that question. Decidedly, she walked over to the light switch and turned it off, and gestured for Ben and Bev to draw the curtains. The room settled into an uneasy darkness, though still semi-lit from the gaps between the curtains and the windows. It was an odd light, the light of a late afternoon hidden from view, like the kind of light that seeped warily into an attic or under the stairs.

"Okay," she began calmly, her voice somehow taking on a different tone. "When was the last time you saw Pennywise as kids?"

"The day in the sewers," Eddie said a bit fearfully. They all nodded their agreement.

"Then that's where we start," she said. "I want you all to remember that morning, if you can. Where were you? What was the weather? Was it cold? Warm? What time did you first see each other? It's the details that matter here, these are the things that will trigger your lost memories. Sometimes it helps if you close your eyes and picture yourself back there."

Obligingly, they all shut their eyes.

"I was at the arcade," Richie mused. "Finally getting the high score I was missing all summer."

"Why didn't you get a high score sooner?" Andi prompted immediately. He hesitated.

"We were searching... for George and the others," he said. "But we'd stopped. I was happy about that... I think. Or angry at someone."

"I was angry too," Stan said distantly, leaning his head back against the bookshelf. "I remember feeling angry and hurt."

"I was in the bathroom," Bev said, eyes closed, her voice hitching a bit. "I turned... and the clown was there. Right there, in my home... he grabbed me and I blacked out."

"I got a phone call," Eddie recalled. "The phone rang, and my mum wanted to know who it was... I found out Bev was missing and we had to go find her. We knew exactly where she'd gone and what had taken her."

"Who called you?" Andi asked.

"I... uh... I don't remember. I guess it was probably Richie."

"How did Richie know Bev was gone?" Andi had already noticed the fogginess about their memories, even in the lead-up to the sewers. The amount of magic ensuring this fog on their brains was so strong, it was almost tangible. Andi found herself wondering if the memory loss applied also to herself. If they were missing someone in their memories, then the logic followed that probably she was also affected by this lost past. That thought made her a bit uncomfortable, since in her previous experience with witnesses she'd always been a neutral unconnected third party to whatever they were trying to remember.

"Someone found me at the arcade... Ben?" Richie guessed.

"Yeah I suppose it was me," Ben agreed though he didn't sound entirely convinced. "I remember that day, it was really hot. Stifling, I was so sweaty, and it was heavy with the threat of a thunderstorm all day. The skies were so dark... it felt apocalyptic."

"For us, it did seem like the end of the world," Stan said softly. "And it _was_ the end of our world, of being kids that summer. Everything changed after that day."

"What time did you go into the sewers?" Andi asked.

"Midday, or very early afternoon," Mike said, sounding quite sure of himself. "I'd just had an early lunch after working on the farm."

"I didn't want to go," Stan said faintly. "I was done with all of that, I just wanted life to go back to normal. But we couldn't leave Bev down there, and Pennywise _knew_ it."

"We were basically chased by the Bowers gang into the sewers," Ben added. "The look in his eyes that day... he really would have killed Mike. It was like there was nothing human left in him."

"I was the sheep," Mike said cryptically, his forehead furrowed while his eyes stayed closed. "I never wanted to be that way again."

"We went in through the Neibolt house, in the basement," Eddie said. "I thought I was going to fall and die, with my broken arm. Somehow we all managed to get down, even Mike, after Henry…"

"After he fell," Ben filled in, emotionlessly. Anything he might have felt about the death of Bowers that day, plummeting down to the depths of the well, was not revealed in the slightest. Andi found this curious, but what she didn't realise was that this was purposely done to hide some of the guilt Ben felt about Bowers' death, not because he felt responsible (he hadn't been, obviously) but because he had actually felt relieved that day when Henry fell, as if a giant knife-wielding weight had been lifted off of his shoulders for good. Which it had... but that didn't stop him from feeling bad for acknowledging it.

"Okay," Andi said. "So you're all in the sewers, after coming down the well… then what?"

There was a silence, and a slight sniffle from the direction of Stan.

"I got separated," he said at last, shortly.

"The not-hot lady found him," Richie said, without his usual mirth. "We were almost too late."

Andi watched Stan carefully during Richie's words, noticing for the first time how pale he was. His eyes were shut to play along with the memory recollection, but he looked quite distressed at the mention of the attack of Pennywise. She noticed he was also scratching a bit at the cuff of his right sleeve, which seemed an odd quirk to have. She made a note to herself to investigate that further later, but the simple conclusion for now was that whatever had happened that day had had a lasting impression on Stan, and still clearly affected him badly now.

"I woke up by myself down there...I tried to escape Pennywise's lair, but there was never a chance of that," Bev said softly. "God, that creature is the stuff of nightmares. And yet... I wasn't _really_ scared, you know."

"Yeah I never understood that, Bev the Brave," Richie said, shifting his position with his eyes still closed and his arms crossed. "How were you _not_ scared of the clown?"

There was a pause, but only Andi saw the small smile creep across Bev's face as she remembered that day.

"Isn't it obvious, doofus?" Bev said. "Because I knew you guys were coming. I felt it, somehow, down there. I knew you were coming and I knew that the most scared of all that day was Pennywise. He was terrified of _us_."

Andi cocked her head at Bev's words. It was not the first time that there was the hinting amongst them of something almost… _supernatural_ … about the relationship between the so-called Losers. She knew she'd be lying to herself if she said she didn't detect something strange about them, almost as if having them all together like this generated some kind of electricity in the air, a weird unseen force that she knew she wasn't a part of but could vaguely sense all the same. The existence of Pennywise challenged her agnostic view of the world: above all, she believed in evidence, and there was no convincing evidence of gods or angels or demons or ghosts despite what people held on to so dearly. But if there was some kind of supernatural entity like the clown, who could bend reality and make you see things that weren't there and sense your fears and thoughts, then who was to say there weren't other entities? That there wasn't a _lot_ more to the world than what could be explained by science alone?

It was a heavy thought, and one she did not like to dwell on too much.

"Why was Pennywise scared of you?" Andi prompted.

"All of us, together… we had some kind of power," Stan said, rubbing against his eyelids. "It was a power we never really understood, something to do with us being kids and knowing that Pennywise _wasn't_ make-believe…"

"And there was something else, behind it all," Mike added. "Something… _someone_ … a vague sense that together we became much bigger than ourselves alone... whatever it was, some power was on our side back then. Maybe it was just luck in the end but it felt like we were more lucky than we deserved to be sometimes. I hope we're still that lucky somehow."

"Okay..." Andi continued, a bit uneasily despite herself. "You rescued Stan. And then... you found Bev?"

"We..." Eddie frowned. "We found the cavern..."

"Cavern?" Andi prompted.

"Yeah, a big open cavern thing, that stretched all the way to the ceiling," Richie filled in. "It was the clown's lair. And all above us... floating..."

"... were the corpses of the missing children," Bev finished dully. "Or what was left of them."

Andi tried not to picture that particular image too clearly.

"Then what?"

There was a silence, which none of the Losers could fill, because at this point they just didn't have the answers.

"We fought the clown," Richie said simply. "And we got Georgie back."

"I'm guessing there was a bit more to it than that," Andi said wryly. "You really don't remember anything else? Even the smallest details will help here, you know."

"Oh! Ben kissed Bev," Eddie said suddenly, a little too gleefully for Ben's liking. A red flush spread across his cheeks, discrediting his otherwise-calm facade immensely. Andi noticed that Beverly's cheeks tinged pink as well.

"It wasn't like that," Ben said defensively, eyes still closed. "I thought it might wake her up."

"It seemed to work," Stan added. But the momentary joy in Eddie's bringing up of Ben's kiss rapidly settled again into the blankness of their memories. Andi looked around the room, scanning the faces of the five people trying so hard to remember what the clown had taken from them. They'd still kept their eyes shut, as she'd asked, but she saw the anxiety and worry etched in their faces. She supposed she'd been a little over-ambitious to assume that the techniques that worked on other people could combat an evil clown's magic... but it had been worth a shot.

She spotted Richie's phone on the small table next to him, still open on the photo of the carving on the tree. And then it occurred to her: she couldn't hope to get the information they needed by asking them to remember it, but if she instead assumed what the information was... maybe they had a _chance_.

"You left someone down there," she said, causing the others to start abruptly. "It's obvious, isn't it? Whoever WD is or was, they must have been there with you that day. _They_ found Richie at the arcade. _They_ called Eddie."

From the scrunched-up frowns on the Losers' faces, she thought perhaps for the first time she was making progress with them.

"Can you remember anything about WD?" she pressed. "Were they male, or female? The same age as you, older? There must be something you remember. What else weird has turned up recently where you have the same feeling of fogginess in your brain, because that's the key to undoing the magic preventing you from remembering. What about your dreams..." She trailed off, a little uncertain about bringing up Mike's nightmare. "... or your nightmares?"

She watched Mike carefully, noticing how he was still quite pale.

"There was someone else there," Mike admitted. "In my dream just now, maybe it was my subconscious trying to help me remember. I don't remember much though, just that someone was there behind Bowers."

"In mine too," Stan said quietly. He didn't seem willing to share any more details than that, and Andi didn't particularly feel like pressing on him about it. She'd interviewed enough witnesses in the past to know when they felt like talking, and when they _didn't_.

"Why would we leave someone down there?" asked Eddie shakily. "Do you think WD died? Why would Pennywise hide that from us?"

"Let's review," Andi said. "You all, plus WD, go into the sewers to face the clown. You all come back, along with George Denbrough. WD doesn't return, and is instead wiped from your memories. That means WD, or whatever happened to them, must be damn important."

"It's so close, I'm _so_ close to remembering," Bev said, her eyes still shut and her face pained. "There's an emptiness in my chest that I've never known the cause of, and I'm so sure now that it is this missing person, WD... I feel like I can almost see them, in my mind... almost remember what they looked like..."

The almost-lifting of the fog was right there in the room with them, and no one else dared speak.

" _He_ -"

And at that moment, the door opened.


	12. Update

Hello...!

I'm a bit nervous posting this because I'm afraid people will think it is a new chapter and get really excited but then be disappointed because this is just an author's note, but... I wanted to let you know that I am in fact working on Chapter 12 after the awfully long hiatus (sorry!). Things got crazy over the last year (yep somehow it has been a year almost), and we moved internationally and new job and all sorts of things and time just went, plus I found this chapter was harder to get into because I know what's coming and this will get part of the way there. I did just recently see IT Chapter 2 and it helped to remind me that I needed to finish this story but also to know what directions they decided to go in (there were some odd parallels both between things in this fic both past and future, in fact!). I'm hopeful that I'll get Chapter 12 done within the next few days and then be motivated enough to keep the ball rolling to the conclusion :D

While I'm here, I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has posted reviews over the last year, it was really great to know people were enjoying the story of this AU and want to see where it goes next, thank you so much for taking the time to review and let me know! Your reviews were the reason this fic stayed in the back of my mind even while dealing with overseas movers forgetting half our stuff in Europe for 2 months (no it's still not here yet), and I will do my best to get the rest of this story told! Stick with me... :)

Back again soon I hope!


	13. Chapter 12

_Note: Phew, here we are! First, let me assure you that I did have a lot of guilt about not coming back to this at the back of my mind for the last months... but there was so much else going on that it was really hard to find the time to get to it. Seeing the second part of the film helped with reminding me of this and getting me back into it! I'm glad it was suggested to me to post that update promising to finish the chapter, because it kind of meant I was committed to it lol. Really sorry it took so long, I hope there are still people out there who are following this! I'll echo what I said before: thanks so much to everyone who has been reading along and leaving reviews, you're the reason I finally got around to updating and the reason I'll do my best to take this fic through to its conclusion (wherever that may be!). I hope this chapter lives up somewhat to your expectations, but I promise there's more to come (and that I'll try to make it not too long before it arrives heh). Do leave a review if you're so inclined, it's always great to know how people find each chapter :) Till next time!_

* * *

 _As you turn to your mind and your thoughts they rewind  
To old happenings and things that are done  
You can't find what's passed, make that happiness last  
Seeing from those eyes what you've become  
What you've become  
_ _-_ Haunt, Bastille

" _He_ -"

The spell that had fallen on the room, in the wake of being so close to pulling back the veil on their memories, shattered instantly as soon as the door opened. They all jumped, startled by the sudden change, as the wooden door swung open revealing a somewhat-sheepish George taking in the scene.

"Eh, sorry... did I interrupt something?" he asked, scratching his head in confusion.

"Only, we were about to figure out the key to defeating Pennywise!" Richie huffed in exasperation, crossing his arms. "Worse timing ever, Denbrough!"

George grimaced, entering the room and shutting the door behind him. The spell really _was_ broken, and what had been momentarily seemingly within grasp was lost to the abyss. The room filled with late afternoon light again as Bev pulled back the curtains, everyone except George blinking in the sudden brightness.

"You're back," Ben said to George, glancing back at Bev. "You had us all a bit worried."

"Yeah, sorry," George said, feeling Bev's eyes settle on him. "I had this sudden urge to go back home, I needed to see the place."

"Did you find what you were looking for?" she prompted, sitting back on the edge of the bay window seat. While she was clearly relieved to see George, she seemed a bit annoyed still that he had gone off so suddenly without explanation. At least now he was willing to reveal where he had been.

"I'm not sure," George said, shrugging. "The family that lives there now is nice. It's a lot warmer of a house than it used to be..." He suddenly stopped. "Wait, the key to _defeating_ Pennywise?"

"We've lost someone, George," Stan said quietly. "Pennywise took someone from us and none of us can remember who."

His words hung in the air, as George processed the implication of what Stan was saying. He shook his head, his mouth suddenly dry.

"That's ridiculous," he choked, his voice catching in his throat, knowing he was denying a feeling deep in his chest that had been there... forever. His subconscious had already buried the waves of memory trying to drown him at his house, but the feeling inside him remained. "How could-"

"Don't you feel it, though?" Beverly interrupted, her eyes hard. "If that's true, if Pennywise can take our memories like that, then how do we know any of this is real? How do we know any of our memories are what they should be? Maybe we were never friends at all, and this is all some trick of the stupid clown to send us in circles just to torture us."

"No," Eddie said firmly. "You all were... you _are_... real to me. There's no way that's fake."

"You guys said it yourselves, there was some power you had against the clown, right?" Andi prompted. George for the first time looked at her, the newcomer amongst them, with a curious expression on his face. This time, Mike jumped in before Andi could say anything to justify her presence.

"This is Andi," he said quickly, gesturing at her. "She's... going to help us fight Pennywise."

"Right..." George said warily, not unwisely suspicious of someone showing up suddenly with knowledge about the clown, when everyone else in the town had always turned a blind eye. "I'm sorry for asking this, but how do we know you're not a trick of Pennywise yourself?"

"Because if I was the clown, I'd probably be using magic to make you all less suspicious of me, or changing your memories so that you think I'm one of you, apparently," she answered curtly, clearly somewhat exasperated by his question. "You're going to need all the help you can get to take that bastard down, and I want in on it."

"Why?" George asked, surprised at her strong resolve to help them defeat Pennywise. "What's the clown to you?"

"Her uncle was almost a victim," Mike said, getting to his feet and saving Andi the effort of another half-true explanation. He resolved to ask her alone later to confirm his suspicions about her story, and find out what it was that she wasn't telling them. Andi nodded once without saying anything, and blinked in surprise when George held out his hand to her.

"I'm George," he said simply. "And you're right, we need all the help we can get."

She shook his hand, nodding again, with determination in her dark eyes.

"Now what?" Richie prompted. "As fun as that trip down memory lane was, cheers for that Andi, I don't really feel like going back there, and while I agree that maybe we have some foggy memories about someone who was possibly with us at the time, no amount of trying to remember is going to cut through that fog. Not if it's Grade-A Derry Killer Clown Magic at play here."

The Losers all looked around the room, helplessness mirrored on each of their faces. The sun was already starting to get a bit low by now, even though it was the mid-afternoon. None of them said it out loud, but no one was particularly keen to go out after dark in Derry. Not as kids, and somehow even less as adults.

"Do... do we even have a game plan?" Eddie said shakily. "We're going to need to face off against this clown, memories or not, and I feel like we don't even have a plan yet."

"Oh!" Mike exclaimed suddenly, Eddie's words triggering something he'd nearly buried away, and he turned to his boxes of newspaper clippings and old missing posters. He rummaged around for a bit, and eventually pulled out a faded piece of paper with scribblings on it and a single word scrawled in big letters across the top: _CHÜD_.

"I spoke with everyone I could about Pennywise," Mike said, looking down solemnly at the piece of paper as if he could see directly back to the day he took the notes on it. "That was a lot of people, and most thought I was crazy. Some were too scared to talk to me, as if it would confirm something they'd been trying to deny their entire lives. Some seemed to think I was a herald of Pennywise, come to haunt them... most didn't want anything to do with the thought of Pennywise ever again, let alone conceive of the notion of trying to stop him."

He held up the paper, pointing at the word. "But I spoke to this one woman, an elderly woman with Native American heritage, she told me that there were stories carried down about a shape-shifting demon which preyed on fears and stole people away. Most of what we already know, really... except for Chüd. She said that you could defeat the demon not with power but will, but your collective will needed to be stronger than the creature's will. A group hoping to defeat it needs to be fully in tune with themselves, each other and their fears. And..." he trailed off, noticing the hopeful looks that had spread across the Losers' faces.

"...well, obviously no one has ever succeeded in the ritual. That too."

Their faces fell, as expected. Even Andi, who had mostly wore a skeptical expression as he described Chüd, looked a little disappointed at his stating of what he thought was obvious.

"That's why what Pennywise is hiding is so important," Mike continued. "Because we can't even try the ritual while we know that we don't have all the puzzle pieces going in, it would be... not good. Our memories are key to this, because what happened in the sewers that day, the person and events we've somehow forgotten... that's a part of us that we are missing."

"Okay, but let's take a step back here," Andi countered. "Can we not go down there properly weaponed-up and just blow the bastard to smithereens? A few well-placed explosives down in the sewers would surely go a long way."

"I'd like to believe that," Mike said, looking around at the rest of the Losers for confirmation. "But last time, I don't think that's what helped us almost beat it."

"Yeah, but she's got a point, we were just kids," Richie said. "What did we have, an air gun, some fence spikes, a bat? That's hardly a fearsome arsenal."

He turned to Andi, apparently excited at the thought of explosives. "You got anything good, or a good hook-up in town?"

"I brought a few things," she said simply. "And I know someone in town where we could get more."

"I don't know, I think Mike's right," Ben mused. "Pennywise can bend reality and make us see what we don't want to see... I don't know how weapons are going to work against something like that."

"But I'd _really_ like to try," Bev added darkly, a small smile on her face, thinking back to her vow for vengeance against Pennywise at the dinner.

"Maybe we bring weapons, but we should also be prepared in case they don't work," George suggested, kind of liking the idea of hedging their bets against Pennywise. "And in any case, I don't think we should be rushing down there just yet until we have a better go at trying to remember what we've forgotten. Maybe it's also partly just time, and waiting a day probably wouldn't hurt."

Mike nodded slightly, agreeing with him. The day was mostly gone now and there was an unspoken agreement amongst them that heading towards the sewers now would be foolish, even though the light of day didn't really reach down there.

"I think we've done enough for today," Mike said finally. "Why don't we take the rest of the afternoon off, and regroup for dinner?"

The group looked fairly relieved at his suggestion, and it didn't take long for them to eagerly filter out. He caught fleeting comments between Eddie and Richie about a games room with a pool table and a showdown to decide who was best once and for all, and smiled to himself. It was good that some things didn't change, that would hopefully be a step along the path to giving them back the power they once had as children.

Andi didn't leave with the others, watching silently as Mike turned back to his materials.

"You're not taking the afternoon off, huh?" she said, knowing the answer as she asked it.

Mike smiled grimly.

"Haven't taken an afternoon off in the last 27 years, seems silly to start now."

She looked at him, her eyes showing mixed emotions. He recognised one emotion clearly because he saw it regularly as he passed through town, as a kid and even now.

Pity.

But one emotion he saw there confused him a bit. It was... empathy? Familiarity? Hard to place it, but he felt like Andi could perhaps relate to him more than he had initially guessed.

"Might be good for me to see what you've collected over the years," she said finally, both an offer and a faint question.

"Sure," Mike said, feeling a bit comforted at the thought of having someone else to dig through things with. "That would be great."

She gave him a hesitant smile, and then cast her gaze on the various boxes which hadn't been unpacked and pinned around the room.

"Where do we start?"

* * *

George watched as Richie cheered his victory in a way-too-over-the-top fashion, pulling his shirt over his head and running around the pool table yelling like an injured cockatoo. Eddie just shook his head with a wry smile on his face, saying nothing about how Richie had actually sunk the white ball just after the black ball and thus conceded the victory to Eddie.

George turned back to Stan, who was looking out across the gardens of the inn with a clouded expression. They were sitting at one of the few tables scattered in a patio area outside the games room, the large glass doors leading to the games room open to let the breeze through. The room itself was largely underwhelming, and consisted of a time-worn pool table (though at least all the balls were there), a dart board with only a few darts pinned on it and a claw machine containing cheap knock-off soft toys and bouncy balls. There were no children to be seen though, and George honestly wasn't even sure there was anyone else staying in the Derry Inn besides their group.

"How're you feeling?" he asked, watching Stan carefully. Stan didn't reply at first, still looking off into the distance where they could just make out Ben and Beverly walking along the path. Then, he sighed and turned to George.

"I'm okay," he said. "In the daytime... everything seems simpler. Last night seems like something that happened in a far-away universe and I just end up feeling... stupid."

"You're not stupid," George said firmly. "We're all scared... for good reason. But you know we have to stick together if we have a chance at this."

Stan didn't say anything, but looked down at the metal lattice of the table they sat at. It was long past its heyday, and the white paint that might have once looked fancy had mostly flaked away to reveal rusting steel underneath.

"If Pennywise could take someone away from us like we think he has," Stan began, picking at the white paint and watching it fall to the ground. "Who knows what else he might have taken? How do we know we're still us, or that we have any control over our actions? How do we know if any of this is real?"

"I think there are rules," George said thoughtfully. "There must be, or wouldn't he have killed us all already? For all this power the clown has, it's not unchecked and something holds him back, I just wish I could figure out what that thing was. Why he comes and goes just to scare us."

"It's to make us taste better, isn't it," Stan said under his breath, eyes dark. "Because the more scared we are..."

He was right, George knew, that was definitely _part_ of it. But something protected them as well. Like in the Neibolt house with Bev earlier, or how the Losers had managed to almost defeat it once. Maybe it was just their collective will, as Mike had put it - maybe that had been strong enough back then.

"I think there is more to it than that," George said, more to himself than to Stan.

 _There's more to everything than what you know._

He looked up, startled, at the voice that sounded like waves on the ocean, a voice that had suddenly been everywhere and nowhere. But it was gone, and Stan was just looking at him like he was crazy. He laughed a bit, rubbing his chin, deciding maybe he was just a bit tired after all their adventures that day.

"Wanna get a beer?" he offered to Stan.

"Hell yes."

* * *

Rage burned within Pennywise as he made his way back to the cistern with his latest cargo, still infuriated at the appearance of the Other meddling in his affairs. The unspoken agreement between them seemed to be breaking down and it enraged Pennywise. Why would that coward show its face after all this time? That self-imposed distance from universal affairs had always suited Pennywise, especially when it came to the humans. They were his playthings and he loathed interference. The Losers had been such a thorn in his side with all their interfering, and he was beginning to wonder why he didn't just kill them all back then, maybe it would have been simpler after all. But he would make them suffer though, oh yes he would. He would make them _wish_ he'd killed them all those years ago...

Entering what should have been the cistern, Pennywise was surprised to find himself suddenly back in the Barrens. Had he been so distracted in his anger that he'd taken such a wrong turn?

No. This was the _boy_.

He narrowed his eyes, sensing a darkness nearby. He saw a shape sitting on a log in this false Barrens, realising with some unease that the boy had thrown him into the mindscape. He seemed... different. Not crying or defeated. Simply sitting there, with a mixed expression, staring at a puddle conjured entirely from his imagination. Pennywise sensed bitterness and regret inside him, and realised he must be coming to the conclusion that the Losers were alive after all. There were many paths the boy could take now but he was most useful to Pennywise if the darkness within him grew, that he recognised. He smirked to himself, seeing an opportunity here.

Bill looked up to see Beverly walking towards him, in her khaki overall shorts and red shirt. She was playing with the key around her neck, a knowing smile on her face.

"B-B-Beverly?" he stammered, again falling into the space between reality and the mindscape, between the past and the present. Pennywise's magic relied heavily on suspension of disbelief, and Bill's confused mind was so torn between reality and illusion that he suspended it immediately without a second thought.

"Bill," she said, shaking her head. "You know we were happy when you stayed down in the sewers right?"

His blood ran cold.

"W-w-w-what?"

"When Pennywise took you, it meant we were free," she smiled. "You deserved it, after all. You dragged us into all your messes trying to save Georgie. Pennywise only came after us because of you. It was all your fault... everything that happened to us."

Bill looked back down at the puddle, his eyes stinging. Her words hit hard because they echoed what he'd already felt for years. He'd risked the lives of his friends, people he'd grown up with, countless times that summer in the name of rescuing what everyone believed was the ghost of his little brother. There was some vindication in the fact that he'd been right about Georgie all along, but that didn't change the fact that he shouldn't have played games with their lives the way he had.

He looked up but now Richie was standing cross-armed in front of him.

"You suck, and I hate you," he blurted, pushing his glasses up on his nose. "I just wanted a normal summer and you nearly got me killed too many times to count. We were supposed to be friends, but all you cared about was Georgie and trying to prove everyone wrong."

Richie narrowed his eyes.

"If I'd died in your quest to save Georgie, I'm not sure you would have even noticed, Bill," he said in a level tone. "I don't think you cared about any of us."

"That's not t-t-t-true!" Bill insisted, even though somewhere in the echoes of his memories he acknowledged the truth in Richie's accusation, and the guilt that bubbled in him encouraged the darkness inside to spread.

"I really almost died in that house, Bill." Now Eddie stood before him, his tone hurt and his eyes dark. "Another minute and the clown would have had me. And the only thing you could think about was going after it, down that forsaken well. Did you even notice my arm? Did you even care when we all split up afterwards and none of us talked for all that time?"

Bill didn't answer, because he knew there was too much truth in Eddie's words. He didn't even try to protest this time. He'd sensed weakness in the clown that day, as it crawled away after Beverly jammed a spike through its head. And yet the spike was not even what had hurt it really, it was the fact that they'd managed to push their way through Pennywise's awful illusion of Betty Ripsom to get through to the other side. Bill remembered the surge of power he'd felt that day, even while terrified, and in his rush to make use of it, Eddie had become collateral damage.

"I'm glad Georgie was saved instead of you," Stan said coldly, his eyes empty and the blood from the clown's teeth marks oozing from the wounds on his face. "It's your fault he even went missing in the first place, from that stupid boat you built him just to get him to stop asking you to play with him. Your family fell apart without Georgie, but without you - everything moved on fine and nobody missed you. We don't miss you, Bill. We were better off without you."

"S-stop!" Bill cried, covering his face with his hands. It hurt too much to hear his friends say what he already feared, that the world without Bill Denbrough was not only continuing as normal, but had in fact been doing better as a result of his departure. That he could be lost to the ends of time and no one noticed, no one came looking, no one _cared_. That he was so meaningless, whereas the absence of Georgie had destroyed him and his parents, and stripped their family home of all its previous warmth.

"Billy."

He knew the voice, but he didn't want to see the face that belonged to it.

"You did this," the voice continued, soft and accusatory. Against his will, Bill peeked slightly through his fingers to see blood dripping down and pooled at the feet of a yellow-clad Georgie. His right arm hung at his side, severed, and his face was pale. Bill dropped his fingers from his face, clenching his fists in his lap as he stared at the decades-old ghost of his younger brother.

"You weren't even sick back then, were you, Billy?"

Bill felt his face flush, remembered the weeks and weeks of being sick. By that day, he had mostly recovered, but when Georgie said he wanted to go outside and play that day in the rain, when it was pouring outside... the regret and guilt he had harboured within himself about making the boat and leaving Georgie to sail it alone in the rain was almost too much to bear back then. Even now, it overpowered him.

"But I s-s-saved you," he whispered, eyes filling with tears as he looked at the unmoving face of Georgie, hazel eyes fixed on Bill with nothing but accusation and disdain.

"I wish I never had you as a brother," Georgie said icily. "I wiped you from my memory as soon as I could."

Bill watched as Georgie was joined by each of the Losers, all holding hands in a circle around him, surrounding him. Their eyes were filled with hatred as they looked at him, their mouths twisted in angry expressions. Each of them began to shout at him, about how much they hated him, about all the mistakes he'd made and all the lies he'd told and all the risks he'd brought to them, about how they were glad he was gone and they wish he was dead or worse, about how much better their lives had been once he'd been wiped from them.

He moaned and curled up, shaking his head against their cries and shouts, feeling the darkness within him stir and build as despair and hopelessness began to give way to even darker feelings, to anger and bitterness and a craving for vengeance against the ones who had abandoned him and never even appreciated the sacrifice he made for then, never realised the years of torture he went through at the hands of Pennywise's nightmares. They all got to move on and grow up and he was stuck in a never-ending loop of pain, unable to distinguish reality from fiction, displaced from his timeline never to return. He didn't deserve this any more than any of them, and for them to hate him so despite what he gave up for them...

Their shouting rose and built and they began to circle him, still holding hands, blurring into each other as they sped up faster and faster until he couldn't even make out their faces anymore.

He screamed in pain, but also in anger, feeling a whirlwind build around him, feeling the darkness that he'd sensed within him begin to spread throughout his body. It scared him, but the same feeling he'd once felt in the Neibolt house of empowerment surged within him once more. In one huge gust, he felt the Losers shredded from existence around him, as the Barrens returned to the quiet tranquil place it had been before Beverly made her appearance.

 _You all deserve what's coming to you._

The worst part of that thought brushing through his mind was that, even though it had been whispering to him from the depths of his darkness before, for the first time he believed it. He embraced the feeling. He wanted to watch them all suffer for what they'd done to him, for the happy lives they'd gotten to lead at his expense.

Even Georgie.

 _Especially_ Georgie.

In defiance, his eyes flashed silver.

* * *

"Yep, I'm done for the day," Andi said, collapsing into one of the room's armchairs. They'd spent the last few hours pouring over Mike's documents, both strewn across the room and within the boxes he'd hauled to the inn, and while they'd had a lot of shared knowledge about things, she'd actually been quite impressed at the amount he'd managed to gather. Then again, he'd had a lot of time to do so, hadn't he?

With a somewhat inquisitive expression on her face, she watched him.

"You've really never left Derry?" she asked, an odd tone in her voice. "Not even once?"

"Not even once," he said wryly. "I thought about it plenty of times... but someone had to keep an eye on things. Someone had to stay. We never even talked about it and yet it just ended up naturally falling to me. So... I stayed."

"Wow," was all she said in response, shaking her head a bit. Mike didn't exactly sense pity in her voice this time, but instead almost a bit of genuine awe. He wondered sometimes himself how he'd stayed so long.

"We're planning to have dinner in the hotel restaurant soon, if you're interested?" he offered.

"Oh... I've actually got other plans," she said vaguely, getting up from the chair immediately as if suddenly realising she was late for something. Mike sensed she was evading _something_ again but wasn't sure what. For a brief awkward moment, he wondered if he'd accidentally given the impression of hitting on her. He thought about bringing up her story and the background behind it, but decided it wasn't quite the right time, it had been a long enough day already. Meanwhile, she grabbed her bag, paused, then held out her hand.

He stared at her in confusion.

"Your phone," she stated.

"Oh, right," he said, unlocking it quickly and handing it over. She typed into it rapidly, then handed it back.

"I put my number in it, under Andi," she said. "Keep me in the loop about the clown, okay? I want to help."

"Will do," he promised. She nodded, hesitating again before speaking.

"Pennywise... he really did a number on you guys huh?"

"Don't I know it," Mike said. "Thanks for helping us try to remember what he took from us."

"No worries, I wish it had worked better," she said sincerely, giving him a half-smile. Then she left the room, closing the door behind her quietly. He was rather confused by this mysterious stranger still, especially since she'd fallen completely under his radar in all of his investigations. Someone who'd grown up in Derry? She must be related to someone he had talked to, but he had no guesses as to who. Maybe, with a bit more time, she'd trust them more and reveal whatever it was that she was hiding...

He glanced down at his phone and saw that it was almost half six, which was the time they'd agreed to meet in the restaurant. He cast a quick eye over his documents, made sure he had the key, triple-checked the lock this time as he closed up the room and starting making his way towards the restaurant, hoping for a nice quiet dinner that was nothing like their attempt at a meal at Jim's.

His hopes were dashed quite rapidly in the entrance hall, as Stan rushed up to him in a panic, looking terrified.

"Mike!" he near-shouted in a shaking voice, pale.

"What is it, Stan?" he asked carefully, knowing he wasn't going to like the answer. He also had since noticed that through the frosted stained-glass windows in the front doors, he could make out blue and red flashing lights.

"It's Georgie," Stan burst. Mike's stomach turned.

"Is he okay?"

Stan shook his head, still pale.

"There's another missing kid, Mike," he said, his voice barely there, still shaking his head as if he didn't want to believe what he was saying.

"The police... they think _George_ did it."


End file.
